As to what you say about my being a Poet, I can return no Answer but by saying that the high Idea I have of poetical fame makes me think I see it towering too high above me. At any rate, I have no right to talk until _Endymion_ is finished, it will be a test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination, and chiefly of my invention which is a rare thing indeed--by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry--and when I consider that this is a great task, and that when done it will take me but a dozen paces towards the temple of fame--it makes me say--God forbid that I should be without such a task! I have Heard Hunt say, and I may be asked--why endeavour after a long Poem? To which I should answer, Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading.... Besides, a long Poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar Star of Poetry, as Fancy is the Sails--and Imagination the rudder.--Did our great Poets ever write Short Pieces? I mean in the shape of Tales. This same invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten as a Poetical excellence--But enough of this, I put on no Laurels till I shall have finished _Endymion_, and I hope Apollo is not angered at my having made a Mockery at Hunt's-- In his reiterated insistence on Invention and Imagination as the prime endowments of a poet, Keats closely echoes Joseph Warton's protest uttered seventy years before: is this because he had read and remembered it, or only because the same words came naturally to him in pleading the same cause? When his task was finished he confessed, in the draft of a preface afterwards cancelled,--'Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain.' But so far as the scale of the poem was concerned he adhered almost exactly to his original purpose, dividing it into four books and finding in himself resources enough to draw them out, all except the first, to a little over a thousand lines each. Throughout Keats's work, the sources of his inspiration in his finest passages can almost always be recognized as dual, some special joy in the delights or sympathy with the doings of nature working together in him with some special stimulus derived from books. Of such a dual kind is the whole inspiration of _Endymion_. The poem is a joint outcome of his intense, his abnormal susceptibility to the spell of moonlight and of his pleasure in the ancient myth of the loves of the moon-goddess Cynthia and the shepherd-prince Endymion[1] as made known to him through the earlier English poets.