of this Endymion knows nothing at all, and he deliberately--or rather with fatuous precipitancy--gives up the glorious goddess for the sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber. Diana, when she re-assumes her proper person, has not a word of reproach to level at him. This may possibly be true to the nature of a goddess--it is certainly not so to that of a woman; and it is the only crisis at which she shows herself different from womanhood--shall we say superior to it? In another and minor sense there is no lack of invention in this Poetic Romance. So far as I know, there is nothing in Grecian mythology furnishing a nucleus for the incidents of Endymion's descending into the bowels of the earth, passing thence beneath the sea, meeting Glaucus, and restoring to life the myriads of drowned lovers, encountering the Indian Bacchante, and taking with her an aerial voyage upon winged coursers. These incidents--except indeed that of the Bacchante--are passing strange, and could not be worked out in a long narrative poem without a lavish command of fanciful and surprising touches. The tale of the aerial voyage seems abortive; its natural _raison d'etre_ and needful sequel would appear to be that Diana, having thus launched Endymion along with herself into the heavenly regions, should bear him straight onward to the high court of the gods; but, instead of that, the horses and their riders return to earth, the air has been traversed to no purpose and with no ostensible result, and Endymion is allowed again to forswear Diana for the Bacchante before the consummation is reached. Presumably Morpheus (Sleep) is responsible for this mishap. His untoward presence in the sky sent the Bacchante, as well as Endymion, to sleep for awhile: when they awoke, Diana had to leave the form of the Bacchante, and, in her character of Phoebe, regulate the nascent moon; though a goddess, she could not be in two places at once, and so the winged horses descended _re infecta_. This is an ingenious point of incident enough; but it is just one of those points which indicate that the poet's mind moved in a region of scintillating details rather than of large and majestic contours.