_Sleep and Poetry_ is printed at the end of the volume, '_I stood tip-toe_' at the beginning. It is hard to tell which of the two pieces was written first.[8] _Sleep and Poetry_ is the longer and more important, and has more the air of having been composed, so to speak, all of a piece. We know that '_I stood tip-toe_' was not finished until the end of December 1816. _Sleep and Poetry_ cannot well have been written later, seeing that the book was published in the first days of the following March, and must therefore have gone to press early in the new year. What seems likeliest is that _Sleep and Poetry_ was written without break during the first freshness of Keats's autumn intimacy at the Hampstead cottage; while '_I stood tip-toe_' may have been begun in the summer and resumed at intervals until the year's end. I shall take _Sleep and Poetry_ first and let '_I stood tip-toe_' come after, as being the direct and express prelude to the great experiment, _Endymion_, which was to follow.
The scheme of _Sleep and Poetry_ is to some extent that of _The Floure and the Lefe_, the pseudo-Chaucerian poem which, as we have seen, had so strongly caught Keats's fancy. Keats takes for his motto lines from that poem telling of a night wakeful but none the less cheerful, and avers that his own poem was the result of just such another night. An opening invocation sets the blessings of sleep above a number of other delightful things which it gives him joy to think of, and recounts the activities of Sleep personified,--'Silent entangler of a beauty's tresses,' etc.,--in lines charming and essentially characteristic, for it is the way of his imagination to be continually discovering active and dynamic qualities in things and to let their passive and inert properties be. But far higher and more precious than the blessings of sleep are those of something else which he will not name:--
What is it? And to what shall I compare it? It has a glory, and nought else can share it: The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy, Chasing away all worldliness and folly; Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder, Or the low rumblings earth's regions under; And sometimes like a gentle whispering Of all the secrets of some wond'rous thing That breathes about us in the vacant air; So that we look around with prying stare, Perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning, And catch soft floatings from a faint-heard hymning; To see the laurel wreath, on high suspended. That is to crown our name when life is ended. Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice, And from the heart up-springs, rejoice! rejoice! Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things, And die away in ardent mutterings.