Following these lines, in his early piece, came others disfigured by cloying touches of the kind too common in his love-scenes. Nor are like touches quite absent from the ode: but they are more than compensated by the exquisite freshness of the natural scenery where the mythic lovers are disclosed--'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' What other poet has compressed into a single line so much of the true life and charm of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all his senses at once? Such felicity in compound epithets is by this time habitual with Keats, and of Spenser, with his 'sea-shouldering whales,' he is now in his own manner the equal. The 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden in _St Agnes' Eve_ is matched in this ode by the 'moss-lain Dryads' and the 'soft-conchèd ear' of Psyche; though the last epithet perhaps jars on us a little with a sense of oddity, like the 'cirque-couchant' snake in _Lamia_. For the rest, there is certainly something strained in the turn of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:-- "Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind." Yet over such difficulties the true lover of poetry will find himself swiftly borne, until he pauses breathless and delighted at the threshold of the sanctuary prepared by the 'gardener Fancy,' his ear charmed by the glow and music of the verse, with its hurrying pace and artfully iterated vowels towards the close, his mind enthralled by the beauty of the invocation and the imagery.