Farewell ungrateful Traitor, Farewell my perjured swain, Let never injured creature Believe a man again. The pleasure of possessing Surpasses all expressing, But 'tis too short a blessing, And Love too long a pain. Do readers recall what the greatest of metrical magicians, who would be so very great a poet if metrical magic were the whole of poetry, or if the body of thought and imagination in his work had commonly half as much vitality as the verbal music which is its vesture,--do readers recall what Mr Swinburne made of this same measure when he took it up half a century later in the _Garden of Proserpine_? But in attending to these incidental lyrics we risk losing sight of what was Keats's main business in these weeks, namely the bringing to a close his eight months' task upon _Endymion_. In finishing the poem he was only a little behind the date he had fixed when he wrote its opening lines at Carisbrooke:-- Many and many a verse I hope to write, Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, I must be near the middle of my story. O may no wintry season, bare and hoary, See it half finish'd: but let Autumn bold, With universal tinge of sober gold, Be all about me when I make an end. The gold had almost all fallen: in the passage in which Keats makes Endymion bid what he supposes to be his last farewell to his mortal love it is the season itself, the season and the autumnal scene, which speak, just as they spoke in the 'drear-nighted December' lyric:-- The Carian No word return'd: both lovelorn, silent, wan, Into the vallies green together went. Far wandering, they were perforce content To sit beneath a fair lone beechen tree; Nor at each other gaz'd, but heavily Por'd on its hazle cirque of shedded leaves. and again:-- At this he press'd His hands against his face, and then did rest His head upon a mossy hillock green, And so remain'd as he a corpse had been All the long day; save when he scantly lifted His eyes abroad, to see how shadows shifted With the slow move of time,--sluggish and weary Until the poplar tops, in journey dreary, Had reach'd the river's brim. Then up he rose, And slowly as that very river flows, Walk'd towards the temple grove with this lament: 'Why such a golden eve? The breeze is sent Careful and soft, that not a leaf may fall Before the serene father of them all Bows down his summer head below the west. Now am I of breath, speech, and speed possest, But at the setting I must bid adieu To her for the last time. Night will strew On the damp grass myriads of lingering leaves, And with them shall I die; nor much it grieves To die, when summer dies on the cold sward.'