At any rate Keats's poem, in its best and central part, is a delightful embroidery on the ideas here expressed. The notion, or vision, of a lawless place where all manner of things divorced in nature abide together and happily jostle, was one that often haunted him, as witness his verse-epistle to Reynolds from Teignmouth, the fragment he calls _The Castle Builder_, and again the piece beginning 'Welcome joy and welcome sorrow,' to which there has been posthumously given the title _A Song of Opposites_. The lines evoking such a vision in this poem, _Fancy_, are almost his happiest in his lighter vein, and are written in the true Elizabethan tradition: the predominant influence in the handling of the measure being, to my ear, that of Ben Jonson, who is wont to give it a certain weight and slowness of movement by the free use of long syllables in the unaccented places; even so Keats, in the passage quoted above, puts in such places words like 'sweet,' 'rain,' 'still,' 'cage,' 'dart,' 'lipp'd.' Passing from the minor to the major achievements of the time, the earliest, and to my mind the finest, of these is _Isabella or the Pot of Basil_. During the writing of _Endymion_, Keats had intended his next effort to be on the lofty classic and symbolic theme of the dethronement of Hyperion and the Titans and the accession of Apollo and the Olympians. But certain reading and talk in the Hunt circle having diverted him from this purpose for a while, and made him take up the idea of a volume of metrical tales from Boccaccio to be written jointly by himself and Reynolds, he chose the tale of the Pot of Basil (the fifth of the fourth day in the _Decameron_), made a sudden beginning at it before he left Hampstead at the end of February, (1819), and finished it at Teignmouth in the course of April. As an appropriate vehicle for an Italian story he took the Italian _ottava rima_ or stanza of eight. Several of the earlier English poets had used this metre: Keats's main model for it was doubtless Edward Fairfax, who, following other Elizabethan translators, had in his fine version from Tasso, _Godfrey of Bulloigne_, done much more than any of his predecessors towards suppling and perfecting its treatment in English. Since then it had been little employed in our serious poetry, but had lately been brilliantly revived for flippant and satiric uses, after later Italian models, by Hookham Frere and Byron. Keats goes over the heads of these direct to Fairfax, and in certain points at least, in variety of pause and cadence and subtle adaptation of verbal music to emotional effect, by a good deal outdoes even that excellent master.[3] Of course it is of the essence of his treatment to avoid, in the closing couplet of the stanza, the special effect of witty snap and suddenness which fits it so well for the purpose of satire.