It is interesting to note how above all other nature-images Keats, whose blood, when his faculties were at their highest tension, was always apt to be heated even to fever-point, prefers those of nature's coolness and refreshment. Here are two or three out of a score of instances. Endymion tells how he had been gazing at the face of his unknown love smiling at him from the well:--
I started up, when lo! refreshfully, There came upon my face in plenteous showers Dew-drops, and dewy buds, and leaves, and flowers, Wrapping all objects from my smothered sight, Bathing my spirit in a new delight.
Coming to a place where a brook issues from a cave, he says to himself--
'Tis the grot Of Proserpine, when Hell, obscure and hot, Doth her resign; and where her tender hands She dabbles on the cool and sluicy sands:
Now he is sitting by a shady spring, And elbow-deep with feverous fingering, Stems the upbursting cold.
For many passages where the magic of nature is mingled instinctively and inseparably with the magic of Greek mythology, the prayer of Endymion to Cynthia above quoted (p. 210) may serve as a sample: and all readers of poetry know the famous lines where the beautiful evocation of a natural scene melts into one, more beautiful still, of a scene of ancient life and worship which comes floated upon the poet's inner vision by an imagined strain of music from across the sea:--
It seem'd he flew, the way so easy was; And like a new-born spirit did he pass Through the green evening quiet in the sun, O'er many a heath, through many a woodland dun, Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams The summer time away. One track unseams A wooded cleft, and, far away, the blue Of ocean fades upon him; then, anew, He sinks adown a solitary glen, Where there was never sound of mortal men, Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences Melting to silence, when upon the breeze Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet, To cheer itself to Delphi.[2]
Often in thus conjuring up visions of the classic past, Keats effects true master strokes of imaginative concentration. Do we not feel half the romance of the _Odyssey_, with the spell that is in the sound of the vowelled place-names of Grecian story, and the breathing mystery of moonlight falling on magic islands of the sea, distilled into the one line--