To sum up, "Endymion" is an essentially poetical poem, which sins, and greatly or even grossly does it sin, by youthful indiscipline and by excess. To deny these blemishes would be childish--they are there, and must be not only admitted, but resented. The faults, like the beauties, of the poem, are positive--not negative or neutral. The work was in fact (as Keats has already told us) a venture of an experimental kind. At the age of twenty-one to twenty-two he had a mind full of poetic material; he turned out his mind into this poetic romance, conscious that, if some things came right, others would come wrong. We are the richer for his rather overweening experiment; we are not to ignore its conditions, nor its partial failure, but we have to thank him none the less. If "a thing of beauty is a joy for ever," a thing of alloyed beauty is a joy in its minor degree. The next long poem of Keats--"Isabella, or the Pot of Basil"--is a vast advance on "Endymion" in sureness of hand and moderation of work: it is in all respects the better poem, and justifies what Keats said (in his letter of October 9, 1818, quoted in our Chapter v.) of the experience which he was sure to gain by the adventurous plunge he had made in "Endymion." Of course it was a less arduous attempt; the subject being one of directly human passion, the story ready-furnished to him by Boccaccio, and the narrative much briefer. Except in altering the locality from Messina to Florence (a change which seems objectless), Keats has adhered faithfully enough to the sweet and sad story of Boccaccio; he has however amplified it much in detail, for the Italian tale is a short one. "Isabella" has always been a favourite with the readers of Keats, and deservedly so; it is tender, touching, and picturesque. Yet I should not place it in the very first rank of the poet's works--the treatment seems to me at once more ambitious and less masculine than is needed. The writer seems too conscious that he has set himself to narrating something pathetic; he tells the story _ab extra_, and enlarges on "the pity of it," instead of leaving the pity to speak to the heart out of the very circumstances themselves. The brothers may have been "ledger-men" and "money-bags" (Boccaccio does not insist upon any such phase of character), and they certainly became criminals, though the Italian author treats their murder of Lorenzo as if it were a sufficiently obvious act in vindication of the family honour; but, when Keats "again asks aloud" why these commercial brothers were proud, he seems to intrude upon us overmuch the personality of the narrator of a tragic story, and pounds away at his text like a pulpiteer. This is only one instance of the flaw which runs through the poem--that it is all told as with a direct appeal to the reader to be sympathetic--indignant now, and now compassionate. Leigh Hunt has pointed out the absurdity of putting into the mouth of one of the brother "money-bags," just as they