Invention and imagination--What the moon meant to Keats--Elizabethan Precedents--Fletcher and Drayton--Drayton's two versions--Debt of Keats to Drayton--Strain of allegory--The Soul's quest for beauty--Phantasmagoric adventures--The four elements theory--Its error--Book I. The exordium--The forest scene--Confession to Peona--Her expostulation--Endymion's defence--The ascending scale--The highest hope--Book II. The praise of love--Underworld marvels--The awakening of Adonis--Embraces in the Jasmine Bower--The quest renewed--New sympathies awakened--Book III. Exordium--Encounter with Glaucus--Glaucus relates his doom--The predestined deliverer--The deliverance--Meaning of the Parable--Its machinery explained--The happy sequel--Book IV. Address to the Muse--The Indian damsel--An ethereal flight--Olympian visions--Descent and renunciation--Distressful farewells--The mystery solved--A chastened victory--Above analysis justified. Keats had long been in love with the Endymion story. The very music of the name, he avers, had gone into his being. We have seen how in the poem beginning 'I stood tiptoe,' finished at the end of 1816, he tried a kind of prelude or induction to the theme, and how, laying this aside, he determined to start fresh on a 'poetical romance' of Endymion on a great scale. When in April 1817, six weeks after the publication of the volume of _Poems_, he went off to the Isle of Wight to get firmly to work on his new task, it is clear that he had its main outlines and dimensions settled in his mind, but nothing more. He wrote to George soon after his departure:--