"He sinks adown a solitary glen, Where there was never sound of mortal men, Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences Melting to silence, when upon the breeze Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet To cheer itself to Delphi:"-- or presences of old religion strongly conceived and realised:-- "Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, Came mother Cybele--alone--alone-- In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown About her majesty, and front death-pale, With turrets crowned." After seeing the vision of Cybele, Endymion, still travelling through the bowels of the earth, is conveyed on an eagle's back down an unfathomable descent, and alighting, presently finds a 'jasmine bower,' whither his celestial mistress again stoops to visit him. Next he encounters the streams, and hears the voices, of Arethusa and Alpheus on their fabled flight to Ortygia: as they disappear down a chasm, he utters a prayer to his goddess in their behalf, and then-- "He turn'd--there was a whelming sound--he stept, There was a cooler light; and so he kept Towards it by a sandy path, and lo! More suddenly than doth a moment go, The visions of the earth were gone and fled-- He saw the giant sea above his head." Hitherto Endymion has been wholly absorbed in his own passion and adventures: but now the fates of others claim his sympathy: first those of Alpheus and Arethusa, and next, throughout nearly the whole of the third book, those of Glaucus and Scylla. Keats handles this latter legend with great freedom, omitting its main point, the transformation of Scylla by Circe into a devouring monster, and making the enchantress punish her rival not by this vile metamorphosis, but by death; or rather a trance resembling death, from which after many ages Glaucus is enabled by Endymion's help to rescue her, and together with her the whole sorrowful fellowship of true lovers drowned at sea. From the point in the hero's submarine adventures where he first meets Glaucus,-- "He saw far in the green concave of the sea An old man sitting calm and peacefully. Upon a weeded rock this old man sat, And his white hair was awful, and a mat Of weeds was cold beneath his cold thin feet"--