By September 14 Keats was back at Winchester, where during the next three weeks he had a chance of testing his capacity for solitude. He seems to have looked at _Hyperion_ again, but made up his mind to go no farther with it, having got to feel its style too latinized and Miltonic. A very few weeks before, in August, he had written to two different correspondents that _Paradise Lost_ was becoming every day a greater wonder to him. Now, in the third week of September he had come to regard it, 'though so fine itself,' as a 'corruption of our language,' a case of 'a northern dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and intonations;' and had convinced himself, paradoxically, that the purest English was Chatterton's,--which is in truth no right English at all, but the attempt of a brilliant self-taught boy to forge himself a fifteenth-century style by gathering miscellaneous half-understood archaisms out of dictionaries and stringing them in fluent stanzas of Spenserian, or post-Spenserian, rhythm and syntax. But it was probably not of Chatterton's vocabulary that Keats was thinking, but rather of the unartificial, straightforward flow of his verse in contrast with Milton's. The apparent suddenness of Keats's change of mind on this matter is characteristic, like his quite unjust return upon himself in regard to _Isabella_, of what Haydon calls his lack of decisions and fixity of aim:--'One day he was full of an epic poem; the next day epic poems were splendid impositions on the world. Never for two days did he know his own intentions.' By these words, to be taken with the usual discount, Haydon means the same thing as Keats means himself when he speaks of his 'unsteady and vagarish disposition'; let us rather say his sensitive and receptive openness of mind to contradictory impressions, even on questions of that art of which he had become so fine a master, and withal his habit of complete surrender to whatever was the dominant impression of the moment.