how thence they swooped downwards in eddies of the mountain wind, and finally how, clinging to and embracing his willing companion in a delirium of happiness, he alighted beside her on a flowery alp, and there fell into a dream-sleep within his sleep; from which awakening to reality, he found himself alone on the bed of poppies, with the breeze at intervals bringing him 'Faint fare-thee-wells and sigh-shrilled adieus,' and with disenchantment fallen upon everything about him:--
All the pleasant hues Of heaven and earth had faded: deepest shades Were deepest dungeons: heaths and sunny shades Were full of pestilent light; and taintless rills Seem'd sooty, and o'erspread with upturn'd gills Of dying fish; the vermeil rose had blown In frightful scarlet, and its thorns outgrown Like spikèd aloe.
Here we have the first of those mystic dream-flights of Endymion and his celestial visitant in company, prefiguring the union of the soul with the spirit of essential Beauty, which have to come true before the end but of which the immediate result is that all other delights lose their savour and turn to ashes. The spirit of man, so the interpretation would seem to run, having once caught the vision of transcendental Beauty and been allowed to embrace it, must pine after it evermore and in its absence can take no delight in nature or mankind. Another way would have been to make his hero find in every such momentary vision or revelation a fresh encouragement, a source of joy and inspiration until the next: but this was not Keats's way. Peona listens with sisterly sympathy, but her powers of help, being purely human, cannot in this case avail. She can only try to rouse him by contrasting his present forlorn and languid state with his former virility and ambition:--
Yet it is strange and sad, alas! That one who through this middle earth should pass Most like a sojourning demi-god, and leave His name upon the harp-string, should achieve No higher bard than simple maidenhood, Sighing alone, and fearfully,--how the blood Left his young cheek; and how he used to stray He knew not where; and how he would say, _Nay_, If any said 'twas love: and yet 'twas love; What could it be but love? How a ring-dove Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path; And how he died: and then, that love doth scathe The gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses. And then the ballad of his sad life closes With sighs, and an alas! Endymion!
