"the pillowy silkiness that rests Full in the speculation of the stars:"-- "Or the quaint mossiness of aged roots:"-- "Ere I can have explored its widenesses."[23] The only other distinguishing marks of Keats's diction in this first volume consist, I think, in the use of the Miltonic 'sphery,' and of an unmeaning coinage of his own, 'boundly,' with a habit--for which Milton, Spenser, and among the moderns Leigh Hunt all alike furnished him the example--of turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns at his convenience. For the rest, Keats writes in the ordinary English of his day, with much more feeling for beauty of language than for correctness, and as yet without any formed or assured poetic style. Single lines and passages declare, indeed, abundantly his vital poetic faculty and instinct. But they are mixed up with much that only illustrates his crudity of taste, and the tendency he at this time shared with Leigh Hunt to mistake the air of chatty, trivial gusto for an air of poetic ease and grace. In the matter of metre, we can see Keats in these poems making a succession of experiments for varying the regularity of the heroic couplet. In the colloquial _Epistles_, addressed severally to G. F. Mathew, to his brother George, and to Cowden Clarke, he contents himself with the use of frequent disyllabic rhymes, and an occasional _enjambement_ or 'overflow.' In the _Specimen of an Induction to a Poem_, and in the fragment of the poem itself, entitled _Calidore_ (a name borrowed from the hero of Spenser's sixth book,) as well as in the unnamed piece beginning 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,' which opens the volume, he further modifies the measure by shortening now and then the second line of the couplet, with a lyric beat that may have been caught either from Spenser's nuptial odes or Milton's _Lycidas_,-- "Open afresh your round of starry folds, Ye ardent marigolds." In _Sleep and Poetry_, which is the most personal and interesting, as well as probably the last-written, poem in the volume, Keats drops this practice, but in other respects varies the rhythm far more boldly, making free use of the overflow, placing his full pauses at any point in a line rather than at the end, and adopting as a principle rather than an exception the Chaucerian and Elizabethan fashion of breaking the couplet by closing a sentence or paragraph with its first line.