happened, I take it, was either that Keats let the March vision, with its imagery of symbolic figures following one another as on a Greek sculptured urn, ripen in his mind until he was ready to compose upon it, and then attributed the vision itself to the season when he was actually putting it into verse; or else that, having fallen some time in May into a second mood of drowsiness and relaxation nearly repeating that of March, the same imagery for its expression arose naturally again in his mind. The ode _On a Grecian Urn_ is obviously of kindred, and probably of contemporary, inspiration with that _On Indolence_, and if the one belongs to May so doubtless does the other. That this is true of the Nightingale ode we know. Some time early in May, nightingales heard both in the Wentworth Place garden and in the grove beside the Spaniards inn at the upper end of the heath set Keats brooding on the contrast between the age-long permanence of that bird-song, older than history, and the fleeting lives of the generations of men that have listened to it; and one morning he took his chair out under a plum-tree in the garden and wrote down the immortal verses, in and out and back and forth on a couple of loose sheets which Brown, two hours after seeing him go out, found him folding away carelessly behind some books in his room. This discovery, says Brown, made him search for more such neglected scraps; and Keats acquiesced in the search, and moreover gave Brown leave to make copies of anything he might find.[12] Haydon tells how Keats recited the new ode to him, 'in his low, tremulous under-tone,' as they walked together in the Hampstead meadows; and it was no doubt on Haydon's suggestion that Keats let James Elmes, a subservient ally of Haydon's in all his battles with the academic powers, have it for publication in his periodical, the _Annals of the Fine Arts_, during the following July. For the date of the _Ode on Melancholy_ the clues are less definite. Burton's _Anatomy_ has clearly to do with inspiring it, but of this, and especially of the sections on the cure of Love-Melancholy, Keats's letters and some of his verses furnish evidence that he had been much of a reader all the spring. Particular phrases, however, in letters of May and early June expressing a very similar strain of feeling to that of the ode, besides its general resemblance to the rest of the group both as to form and mood, may be taken as approximately dating it.