To the student of _Endymion_ there are few things more interesting than to observe Keats's technical and spiritual relations to his Elizabethan models in those places where he has one or another of them manifestly in remembrance. Here is the passage in Sandys's _Ovid_ which tells how Cybele, the Earth-Mother, punished the pair of lovers Hippomenes and Atalanta for the pollution of her sanctuary by turning them into lions and yoking them to her car:-- The Mother, crown'd With towers, had struck them to the Stygian sound, But that she thought that punishment too small. When yellow manes on their smooth shoulders fall; Their arms, to legs; their fingers turn to nails; Their breasts of wondrous strength: their tufted tails Whisk up the dust; their looks are full of dread; For speech they roar: the woods become their bed. These Lions, fear'd by others, Cybel checks With curbing bits, and yokes their stubborn necks. This is a typical example of Ovid's brilliantly clever, quite unromantic, unsurprised, and as it were unblinking way of detailing the marvels of an act of transformation. Keats's recollection of it--and probably also of a certain engraving after a Roman altar-relief of Cybele and her yoked lions--inspires a vision of intense imaginative life expressed in verse of a noble solemnity and sonority:-- Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, Came mother Cybele! alone--alone-- In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown About her majesty, and front death-pale, With turrets crown'd. Four maned lions hale The sluggish wheels; solemn their toothed maws, Their surly eyes brow-hidden, heavy paws Uplifted drowsily, and nervy tails Cowering their tawny brushes. Silent sails This shadowy queen athwart, and faints away In another gloomy arch. The four lions instead of two must be a whim of Keats's imagination, and finds no authority either from Ovid or from ancient sculpture. Should any reader wish to pursue farther the comparison between Ovid in the _Metamorphoses_ and Keats in _Endymion_, let him turn to the passage of Ovid where Polyphemus tells Galatea what rustic treasures he will lavish upon her if she will be his,--the same passage from which is derived the famous song in Handel's _Acis and Galatea_: let him turn to this and compare it with the list of similar delights offered by Endymion to the Indian maiden when he is bent on forgoing his dreams of a celestial union for her sake, and he will see how they are dematerialized and refined yet at the same time made richer in colour and enchantment.