"Of the story we have been able to make out but little. It seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion; but of this, as the scope of the work has altogether escaped us, we cannot speak with any degree of certainty, and must therefore content ourselves with giving some instances of its diction and versification. And here again we are perplexed and puzzled. At first it appeared to us that Mr. Keats had been amusing himself and wearying his readers with an immeasurable game at _bouts rimés_; but, if we recollect rightly, it is an indispensable condition at this play that the rhymes, when filled up, shall have a meaning; and our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows, not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the _rhyme_ with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds; and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which they turn.
"We shall select, not as the most striking instance, but as that least liable to suspicion, a passage from the opening of the poem.
'Such the sun, the moon, Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are daffodils, With the green world they live in; and clear rills That for themselves a cooling covert make 'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms; And such too is the grandeur of the dooms We have imagined for the mighty dead,' &c.
Here it is clear that the word, and not the idea, _moon_, produces the simple sheep and their shady _boon_, and that 'the _dooms_ of the mighty dead' would never have intruded themselves but for the 'fair musk-rose _blooms_.'
'For 'twas the morn. Apollo's upward fire Made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre Of brightness so unsullied that therein A melancholy spirit well might win Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine Into the winds. Rain-scented eglantine Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun; The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass; Man's voice was on the mountains: and the mass Of Nature's lives and wonders pulsed tenfold To feel this sunrise and its glories old.'