The second contemporary influence to be considered is that of Shelley. Shelley's _Alastor_, it will be remembered, published early in 1816, had been praised by Hunt in _The Examiner_ for December of that year, and in the following January Hunt printed in the same paper Shelley's _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_. In the course of that same December and January Keats had seen a good deal of Shelley at Hunt's and taken part with him in many talks on poetry. It is certain that Keats read and was impressed by _Alastor_: doubtless he also read the _Hymn_. How much did either or both influence him in the composition of _Endymion_? Mr Andrew Bradley thinks he sees evidence that _Alastor_ influenced him strongly. That poem is a parable, as _Endymion_ is, of the adventures of a poet's soul; and it enforces, as much of _Endymion_ does, the doctrine that a poet cannot without ruin to himself live in isolation from human sympathies. But there the resemblance between the two conceptions really ends. In _Alastor_ the poet, having lived in solitary communion 'with all that is most beautiful and august in nature and in human thought and the world's past' (the words are Shelley's own prose summary of the imagined experiences which the first part of the poem relates in splendid verse), is suddenly awakened, by a love-vision which comes to him in a dream, to the passionate desire of finding and mating with a kindred soul, the living counterpart of his dream, who shall share with him the delight of such communion. The desire, ever unsatisfied, turns all his former joys to ashes, and drives him forth by unheard-of ways through monstrous wildernesses until he pines and dies, or in the strained Shelleyan phrase, 'Blasted by his disappointment, he descends into an untimely grave.' The essence of the theme is the quest of the poetic soul for perfect spiritual sympathy and its failure to discover what it seeks. Shelley does not make it fully clear whether the ideal of his poet's dream is a purely abstract entity, an incarnation of the collective response which he hopes, but fails, to find from his fellow creatures at large; or whether, or how far, he is transcendentally expressing his own personal longing for an ideally sympathetic soul-companion in the shape of woman. Both strains no doubt enter into his conception; so far as the private strain comes in, many passages of his life furnish a mournfully ironic comment on his dream. But in any case his conception is fundamentally different from that of Keats in _Endymion_. The essence of Keats's task is to set forth the craving of the poet for full communion with the essential spirit of Beauty in the world, and the discipline by which he is led, through the exercise of the active human sympathies and the toilsome acquisition of knowledge, to the prosperous and beatific achievement of his quest.