Every one knows the story: how a maiden of Messina (Keats chooses to transfer the scene to Florence), living in the house of her merchant brothers, in secret loves one of their clerks: how her brothers, discovering her secret, take out her lover to the forest and there slay and bury him: how his ghost appearing to her in a dream reveals his fate and burial place: how she hastens thither with her nurse, digs till she finds the corpse and having found it carries home the head and sets it in a pot of basil, or sweet marjoram, which she cherishes and waters with her tears until her brothers take it from her, whereupon she pines away and dies. Boccaccio tells this story with that admirable combination of straightforward conciseness and finished grace which characterizes his mature prose. Keats in his poem romantically amplifies and embroiders it. In his way of doing so we can trace the influence of Chaucer, with whose _Troilus and Criseyde_, that miracle of detailed, long-drawn, yet ever human and rarely tedious narrative, he was by this time familiar. Keats, while avoiding Chaucer's prolixity, diversifies his tale with invocations to Love and to the Muses, with apostrophes to the reader and ejaculatory comments on the events, entirely in Chaucer's manner: only whereas Chaucer relegates the more part of such matter to the 'proems' of his several books, Keats, having plunged into the thick of the story in his first line, finds room for his apostrophes and invocations in the course of the narrative itself. Most critics have taken the view that this is evidence of weak or immature art. To my mind this is not so: the pauses thus introduced are never long enough to hold up the flow and interest of the narrative, while they afford welcome rests to the attention, pleasant changes from a too sustained narrative construction, with consequent beautiful and happy modulations in the movement of the verse. One of these invocations--invocation and apology together--is to Boccaccio himself, disowning all idea of improving the tale and defining the poet's attempt as made but to honour him,-- To stead thee as a verse in English tongue, An echo of thee in the north-wind sung. The definition is exact. The revived spirit of English romantic poetry breathes in every line of the verse, and as in _Endymion_, so here, the southern setting is conceived as though it were English. 'So the two brothers and their murder'd man' (the force of the anticipatory epithet has been celebrated by every critic since Lamb)-- So the two brothers and their murder'd man Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream Gurgles through straiten'd banks, and still doth fan Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream Keep head against the freshets.