That which I have shown reason for believing to be the earliest of the group, the _Ode to Psyche_ written in the last days of April, differs somewhat from the rest both in form and spirit. Its strophes are longer and more irregular: its strain less inward and brooding, with more of lyric ardour and exaltation. It tells of the poet's delight in that late, exquisitely and spiritually symbolic product of the mythologic spirit of expiring paganism, the story of Cupid and Psyche. What may have especially turned his attention to this fable at that moment we cannot tell. Possibly the mention of it in Burton's _Anatomy_ may have set him on to reading the original source, the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, in Adlington's translation: there are passages in _Lamia_ which suggest such a reading,[15] and the noble, rhythmical English of that Elizabethan version, loose as it may be in point of scholarship, could not fail to charm his ear. Or possibly recent study of the plates in the _Musee Napoleon_ (as to which more by and by) may have brought freshly to his memory the sculptured group in which the story is embodied. But that he had always loved the story we know from the passage 'I stood tip-toe' beginning-- So felt he, who first told how Psyche went On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment, as well as from his confession that in boyhood he used to admire its languid and long-drawn romantic treatment in the poem of Mrs Tighe. Cloying touches of languor, such as often disfigure his own earlier work, are not wanting in the opening lines in which he tells how he came upon the fabled couple in a dream, but are more than compensated by the charm of the scene where he finds them reposing, 'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' What other poet has compressed into a single line so much of the essential virtue of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all his senses at once? Such felicity in compound epithets is by this time habitual with Keats; and of Spenser with his 'sea-shouldering whales' he is now more than the equal. The 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden in _St Agnes' Eve_ is matched in this ode by the 'soft-conched ear' of Psyche,--though the compound is perhaps a little forced and odd, like the 'cirque-couchant' snake in _Lamia_. The invocation in the third and fourth stanzas expresses, with the fullest reach of Keats's felicity in style and a singular freshness and fire of music in the verse, both his sense of the meaning of Greek nature-religion and his delight in imagining the beauty of its shrines and ritual. For the rest, there seems at first something strained in the turn of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:--