The derivation of this imagery from the passage of Keats seems evident alike from its general conception and sequence and from details like the anchors, beaks, targes, the prodigious primeval sculptures, the skeletons of behemoth and alligator and antediluvian monsters without name. Another possible debt of Shelley to _Endymion_ has also been suggested in the list of delights which the poet, in the closing passage of _Epipsychidion_, proposes to share with his spirit's mate in their imagined island home in the Ægean. If Shelley indeed owes anything to _Endymion_ here, he has etherealized and transcendentalized his original even more than Keats did Ovid. Possibly, it may also be suggested, it may have been Shelley's reading of _Endymion_ that led him at this time to take two of the myths handled in it by Keats as subjects for his own two lyrics, _Arethusa_ and the _Hymn to Pan_ (both of 1820); but he may just as well have thought of these subjects independently; and in any case they are absolutely in his own vein, nor was their exquisite leaping and liquid lightness of rhythm a thing at any time within Keats's compass. It would be tempting to attribute to a desire of emulating and improving on Keats Shelley's beautifully accomplished use of the rimed couplet with varied pause and free overflow in the _Epistle to Maria Gisborne_ (1819) and _Epipsychidion_ (1820), but that he had already made a first experiment in the same kind with _Julian and Maddalo_, written before his copy of _Endymion_ had reached him, so that we must take his impulse in the matter to have been drawn not intermediately through Keats but direct from Leigh Hunt.
[1] Why will my friend Professor Saintsbury, in range of reading and industry the master of us all, insist on trying to persuade us that in the metre of _Endymion_ Keats owed something to the _Pharonnida_ of William Chamberlayne? There is absolutely no metrical usage in Keats's poem for which his familiar Elizabethan and Jacobean masters do not furnish ample precedent: he differs from them only in taking more special care to avoid any prolonged run of closed couplets. I do not believe he could have brought himself to read two pages of _Pharonnida_. But that is only an opinion, and the matter can be decided by a simple computation on the fingers. The fact is that there are no five pages of _Pharonnida_ which do not contain more of those unfortunate rimings on 'in' and 'by' and 'to' and 'on' and 'of' followed by their nouns in the next line, or worse still, on 'to' followed by its infinitive,--on 'it' and 'than' and 'be' and 'which,' and all the featherweight particles and prepositions and auxiliaries and relatives impossible to stress or pause on for a moment,--than can be found in any whole book of _Endymion_. It is also a fact that the average proportion of lines not ending with a comma or other pause is in _Pharonnida_ about ten to one, and in _Endymion_ not more than two and a half to one. That the sentence-structure of _Pharonnida_ is as detestably disjointed and invertebrate as that of _Endymion_ is graceful and well-articulated I hesitate to insist, because that again is a matter of ear and feeling, and not, like my other points, of sheer arithmetic.