She took me to her elfin grot, And there she gazed and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild, wild eyes With kisses four. And there she lulled me asleep, And there I dreamed, ah woe betide, The latest dream I ever dreamed On the cold hill side. I saw pale kings, and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; Who cried--'La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall.' I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke, and found me here On the cold hill side. And this is why I sojourn here Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing. Keats of course gives his brother no hint of what to us seems so manifest, the application of these verses to his own predicament, and only adds a light and laughing comment on one of the rime-words. Closing his packet a few days later (May 3) he adds, as the last poem he has written, the _Ode to Psyche_. He wrote, as is well known, four other odes this spring, those _On Indolence_, _On a Grecian Urn_, _To a Nightingale_ and _To Melancholy_. The _Ode to Psyche_ has commonly been taken to be the latest of the five. I take it, on the contrary, to have been the first. Had he been ready with any of the others when he finished his letter, I think he would almost certainly have copied and sent on one or more of them also. Coupled with his re-iterated assertion of complete poetic idleness,--'the idle fever of two months without any fruit,'--lasting from mid-February until well past mid-April, the absence of all the four other odes from this packet must count as evidence that the _Ode to Psyche_ represents the first wave of a new tide of inspiration--inspiration this time not narrative and creative but lyric and meditative--and that the rest of the odes followed and were composed in the course of May. Personally I am convinced that this was the case. I make no exception in regard to the ode _On Indolence_, although, seeing that it embodies just such a relaxed mood of mind and body as we have found recorded by Keats in his letter to his brother under date March 19, and embodies it with the self-same imagery, it is usually assumed to have been written at or very nearly about the same date. But Keats in the ode itself expressly tells us otherwise, calling his mood at the hour of writing one of 'summer indolence' and defining the season as May-time, when the outdoor vines are newly bursting into leaf. Of course, it may be answered, a poet writing in March may perfectly well choose to advance the season to May by a poetic fiction. But would Keats in this case have felt any need or impulse to do so? I doubt it. Moreover a reference to the poem by Keats in a letter of early June shows that phrases of it were still hanging freshly in his memory and seems to imply that it was a thing then lately written. What