at any rate, the following lines of Drayton contain evidently the hint for the wanderings on which Keats sends his hero (and for which antiquity affords no warrant) through earth, sea, and air[32]?-- "Endymion now forsakes All the delights that shepherds do prefer, And sets his mind so generally on her That, all neglected, to the groves and springs He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings (As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers, Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers The silver Naides bathe them in the bracke. Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back Among the blue Nereides: and when Weary of waters goddess-like again She the high mountains actively assays, And there amongst the light Oriades, That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort: Sometime amongst those that with them comport The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent; And there she stays not, but incontinent Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw, And with Endymion pleased that she saw, Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye Stripping the winds----" Fletcher again, a writer with whom Keats was very familiar, and whose inspiration, in the idyllic and lyric parts of his work, is closely kindred to his own--Fletcher in the _Faithful Shepherdess_ makes Chloe tell, in lines beautifully paraphrased and amplified from Theocritus-- "How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes She took eternal fire that never dies; How she convey'd him softly in a sleep, His temples bound with poppy, to the steep Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night, Gilding the mountain with her brother's light, To kiss her sweetest." The subject thus touched by Drayton and Fletcher had been long, as we have seen already, in Keats's thoughts. Not only had the charm of this old pastoral nature-myth of the Greeks interwoven itself in his being with his natural sensibility to the physical and spiritual spell of moonlight: but deeper and more abstract meanings than its own had gathered about the story in his mind. The divine vision which haunts Endymion in dreams is for Keats symbolical of Beauty itself, and it is the passion of the human soul for beauty which he attempts, more or less consciously, to shadow forth in the quest of the shepherd-prince after his love[33].