Finally, Keats abandons and breaks off this tentative exordium of his unwritten poem with the cry:-- "Cynthia! I cannot tell the greater blisses That followed thine and thy dear shepherd's kisses: Was there a poet born? But now no more My wandering spirit must no farther soar." Was there a poet born? Is the labour and the reward of poetry really and truly destined to be his? The question is one which recurs in this early volume importunately and in many tones; sometimes with words and cadences closely recalling those of Milton in his boyish _Vacation Exercise_; sometimes with a cry like this, which occurs twice over in the piece called _Sleep and Poetry_,-- "O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen, That am not yet a glorious denizen Of thy wide heaven:"-- and anon, with a less wavering, more confident and daring tone of young ambition,-- "But off, Despondence! miserable bane! They should not know thee, who, athirst to gain A noble end, are thirsty every hour. What though I am not wealthy in the dower Of spanning wisdom: though I do not know The shiftings of the mighty winds that blow Hither and thither all the changing thoughts Of man: though no great ministering reason sorts Out the dark mysteries of human souls To clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls A vast idea before me"--. The feeling expressed in these last lines, the sense of the overmastering pressure and amplitude of an inspiration as yet unrealized and indistinct, gives way in other passages to confident anticipations of fame, and of the place which he will hold in the affections of posterity.