PAGE 17. l. 248. Refers to the story of Orpheus' attempt to rescue his wife Eurydice from Hades. With his exquisite music he charmed Cerberus, the fierce dog who guarded hell-gates, into submission, and won Pluto's consent that he should lead Eurydice back to the upper world on one condition--that he would not look back to see that she was following. When he was almost at the gates, love and curiosity overpowered him, and he looked back--to see Eurydice fall back into Hades whence he now might never win her. PAGE 18. l. 262. _thy far wishes_, your wishes when you are far off. l. 265. _Pleiad._ The Pleiades are seven stars making a constellation. Cf. Walt Whitman, 'On the beach at night.' ll. 266-7. _keep in tune Thy spheres._ Refers to the music which the heavenly bodies were supposed to make as they moved round the earth. Cf. _Merchant of Venice_, V. i. 60. PAGE 20. l. 294. _new lips._ Cf. l. 191. l. 297. _Into another_, i.e. into the trance of passion from which he only wakes to die. PAGE 21. l. 320. _Adonian feast._ Adonis was a beautiful youth beloved of Venus. He was killed by a wild boar when hunting, and Venus then had him borne to Elysium, where he sleeps pillowed on flowers. Cf. _Endymion_, ii. 387. PAGE 22. l. 329. _Peris_, in Persian story fairies, descended from the fallen angels. ll. 330-2. The vulgarity of these lines we may attribute partly to the influence of Leigh Hunt, who himself wrote of The two divinest things the world has got-- A lovely woman and a rural spot. It was an influence which Keats, with the development of his own character and genius, was rapidly outgrowing. l. 333. _Pyrrha's pebbles._ There is a legend that, after the flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha cast stones behind them which became men, thus re-peopling the world. PAGE 23. ll. 350-4. Keats brings the very atmosphere of a dream about us in these lines, and makes us hear the murmur of the city as something remote from the chief actors. l. 352. _lewd_, ignorant. The original meaning of the word which came later to mean dissolute. PAGE 24. l. 360. _corniced shade._ Cf. _Eve of St. Agnes_, ix, 'Buttress'd from moonlight.' ll. 363-77. Note the feeling of fate in the first appearance of Apollonius. PAGE 25. l. 377. _dreams._ Lycius is conscious that it is an illusion even whilst he yields himself up to it. l. 386. _Aeolian._ Aeolus was the god of the winds. PAGE 26. l. 394. _flitter-winged._ Imagining the poem winging its way along like a bird. _Flitter_, cf. flittermouse = bat. PART II. PAGE 27. ll. 1-9. Again a passage unworthy of Keats's genius. Perhaps the attempt to be light, like his seventeenth-century model, Dryden, led him for the moment to adopt something of the cynicism of that age about love. ll. 7-9. i.e. If Lycius had lived longer his experience might have either contradicted or corroborated this saying. PAGE 28. l. 27. _Deafening_, in the unusual sense of making inaudible.