As to the literary associations which drew Keats to the Endymion story, there is scarce one of our Elizabethan poets but touches on it briefly or at length. Keats was no doubt acquainted with the Endimion of John Lyly, an allegorical court comedy in sprightly prose which had been among the plays edited, as it happened, by one of his new Hampstead friends, Charles Dilke: but in it he could have found nothing to his purpose. Marlowe is likely to have been in his mind, with
— that night-wandering, pale, and watery star,
When yawning dragons draw her thirling car
From Latmus’ mount up to the gloomy sky,
Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty,
She proudly sits.
So will Shakespeare have been certainly, with the call —
Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion,
And would not be awaked,
uttered by Portia at the close of the most enchanting moonlight scene in all literature. Scarcely less familiar to Keats will have been the invocation near the end of Spenser’s Epithalamion, or the reference to ‘pale-changeful Cynthia’ and her Endymion in Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals; or those that recur once and again in the sonnets of Drummond of Hawthornden, or those he would have remembered from the masque in the Maid’s Tragedy of Beaumont and Fletcher, or in translations of the love-elegies and heroical epistles of Ovid. But the two Elizabethans, I think, who were chiefly in his conscious or unconscious recollection when he meditated his theme are Fletcher and Michael Drayton. Here is the fine Endymion passage, delightfully paraphrased from Theocritus, and put into the mouth of the wanton Cloe, by Fletcher in the Faithful Shepherdess, that tedious, absurd, exquisitely written pastoral of which the measures caught and charmed Keats’ ear in youth as they had caught and charmed the ear of Milton before him.
Shepherd, I pray thee stay, where hast thou been?
Or whither go’st thou? Here be Woods as green
As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet,
As where smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet
Face of the curled Streams, with Flowers as many
As the young Spring gives, and as choise as any;
Here be all new Delights, cool Streams and Wells,
Arbors o’rgrown with Woodbinds, Caves, and Dells,
Chuse where thou wilt, whilst I sit by, and sing,
Or gather Rushes to make many a Ring
For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of Love,
How the pale Phoebe hunting in a Grove,
First saw the Boy Endymion, from whose Eyes
She took eternal fire that never dyes:
How she convey’d him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the Mountain with her Brothers light,
To kiss her sweetest.
In regard to Drayton’s handling of the story there is more to note. In early life he wrote a poem in heroic couplets called Endimion and Phoebe. This he never reprinted, but introduced passages from it into a later piece in the same metre called the Man in the Moone. The volume containing Drayton’s earlier Endimion and Phoebe became so rare that when Payne Collier reprinted it in 1856 only two copies were known to exist. It is unlikely that Keats should have seen either of these. But he possessed of his own a copy of Drayton’s poems in Smethwick’s edition of 1636 (one of the prettiest of seventeenth century books). The Man in the Moone is included in that volume, and that Keats was familiar with it is evident. In it, as in the earlier version, but with a difference, the poet, having enthroned his shepherd-prince beside Cynthia in her kingdom of the moon, weaves round him a web of mystical disquisition and allegory, in which popular fancies and superstitions are queerly jumbled up with the then current conceptions of the science of astronomy and the traditions of mediæval theology as to the number and order of the celestial hierarchies. In Drayton’s earlier poem all this is highly serious and written in a rich and decorated vein of poetry intended, it might seem, to rival Marlowe’s Hero and Leander: in his later, where the tale is told by a shepherd to his mates at the feast of Pan, the narrator lets down his theme with a satiric close in the vein of Lucian, recounting the human delinquencies nightly espied by Cynthia and her lover from their sphere.
The particular points in Keats’ Endymion where I seem to find suggestions from Drayton’s Man in the Moone are these. First the idea of introducing the story with the feast of Pan, — but as against this it may be said with truth that feasts of Pan are stock incidents in Elizabethan masques and pastorals generally. Second, his sending his hero on journeys beside or in pursuit of his goddess through manifold bewildering regions of the earth and air: for this antiquity affords no warrant, and the hint may have been partly due to the following passage in Drayton (which is also interesting for its exceptionally breathless and trailing treatment of the verse): —
Endymion now forsakes
All the delights that shepherds do prefer,
And sets his mind so gen’rally on her
That, all neglected, to the groves and springs,
He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings
(As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers,
Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers
The silver Naides bathe them in the brack.
Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back,
Amongst the blue Nereides; and when,
Weary of waters, goddess-like again
She the high mountains actively assays,
And there amongst the light Oriades,
That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort;
Sometimes amongst those that with them comport,
The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent;
And there she stays not; but incontinent
Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw,
And with Endymion pleased that she saw,
Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye,
Stripping the winds, beholding from the sky
The Earth in roundness of a perfect ball, —
the sequel is irrelevant, and the passage so loose in grammar and construction that it matters not where it is broken off.
Thirdly, we have the curious invention of the magic robe of Glaucus in Keats’ third book. In it, we are told, all the rulers and all the denizens of ocean are figured and indued with magic power to dwindle and dilate before the beholder’s eyes. Keats describes this mystic garment in a dozen lines which can scarcely be other than a summary and generalized recollection of a long passage of eighty in which Drayton describes the mantle of Cynthia herself, inwoven with figures of sea and storm and shipwreck and seabirds and of men fishing and fowling (crafts supposed to be subject to the planetary influence of the moon) in tidal or inland waters. And lastly, Keats in his second book has taken a manifest hint from Drayton where he makes Venus say archly how she has been guessing in vain which among the Olympian goddesses is Endymion’s lover.
Not merely by delight in particular poets and familiarity with favourite passages, but by rooted instinct and by his entire self-training, Keats was beyond all his contemporaries, — and it is the cardinal fact to be borne in mind about him, — the lineal descendant and direct heir of the Elizabethans. The spirit of Elizabethan poetry was born again in him with its excesses and defects as well as its virtues. One general