PAGE 18. l. 262. _thy far wishes_, your wishes when you are far off.
l. 265. _Pleiad._ The Pleiades are seven stars making a constellation. Cf. Walt Whitman, 'On the beach at night.'
ll. 266-7. _keep in tune Thy spheres._ Refers to the music which the heavenly bodies were supposed to make as they moved round the earth. Cf. _Merchant of Venice_, V. i. 60.
l. 297. _Into another_, i.e. into the trance of passion from which he only wakes to die.
PAGE 21. l. 320. _Adonian feast._ Adonis was a beautiful youth beloved of Venus. He was killed by a wild boar when hunting, and Venus then had him borne to Elysium, where he sleeps pillowed on flowers. Cf. _Endymion_, ii. 387.
PAGE 22. l. 329. _Peris_, in Persian story fairies, descended from the fallen angels.
ll. 330-2. The vulgarity of these lines we may attribute partly to the influence of Leigh Hunt, who himself wrote of
The two divinest things the world has got-- A lovely woman and a rural spot.
It was an influence which Keats, with the development of his own character and genius, was rapidly outgrowing.
l. 333. _Pyrrha's pebbles._ There is a legend that, after the flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha cast stones behind them which became men, thus re-peopling the world.
PAGE 23. ll. 350-4. Keats brings the very atmosphere of a dream about us in these lines, and makes us hear the murmur of the city as something remote from the chief actors.
l. 352. _lewd_, ignorant. The original meaning of the word which came later to mean dissolute.
PAGE 24. l. 360. _corniced shade._ Cf. _Eve of St. Agnes_, ix, 'Buttress'd from moonlight.'
ll. 363-77. Note the feeling of fate in the first appearance of Apollonius.
PAGE 25. l. 377. _dreams._ Lycius is conscious that it is an illusion even whilst he yields himself up to it.
l. 386. _Aeolian._ Aeolus was the god of the winds.
PAGE 26. l. 394. _flitter-winged._ Imagining the poem winging its way along like a bird. _Flitter_, cf. flittermouse = bat.
PAGE 27. ll. 1-9. Again a passage unworthy of Keats's genius. Perhaps the attempt to be light, like his seventeenth-century model, Dryden, led him for the moment to adopt something of the cynicism of that age about love.
ll. 7-9. i.e. If Lycius had lived longer his experience might have either contradicted or corroborated this saying.