[17] Sweet Philomela (then he heard her sing) I do not envy thy sweet carolling, But do admire thee each even and morrow Canst carelessly thus sing away thy sorrow. CHAPTER XIV WORK OF 1818, 1819.--II. THE FRAGMENTS AND EXPERIMENTS Snatches expressive of moods--_Ode to Maia_--_Hyperion_: its scheme and scale--Sources: Homer and Hesiod--Pierre Ronsard--Miltonisms--Voices of the Titans--A match and no match for Milton--A great beginning--Question as to sequel--Difficulties and a suggestion--The scheme abandoned--_The Eve of St Mark_--Chaucer and Morris--Judgement of Rossetti--Dissent of W. B. Scott--The solution--Keats as dramatist--_Otho_ and _King Stephen_--_The Cap and Bells_--Why a failure--Flashes of Beauty--Recast of _Hyperion_--Its leading ideas--Their history in Keats's mind--Preamble: another feast of fruits--The sanctuary--The admonition--The monitress--The attempt breaks off. Much of our clearest insight into Keats's mind and genius is gained from the class of his fragments which do not represent any definite poetical purpose or plan, and were never meant to be more than mere snatches and momentary outpourings. Such, though they only express a passing mood, are the lines in his letter to Reynolds of February 1818, translating the early song of the thrush into a warning not to fret after knowledge. Such is the contrasted passage of shifting, perplexed meditation on the problems of life, and the failure of the imagination to solve them alone, in the rimed epistle to the same friend six weeks later. Such, very especially, is the cry declaring that the true poet is the soul sympathetic with every form and mode of life and ready to merge its identity in that of any and every sentient creature: compare the passage in one of his letters where he tells how his own can enter into that of a sparrow picking about the gravel:-- Where's the Poet? show him! show him, Muses nine! that I may know him. 'Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he King, Or poorest of the beggar-clan, Or any other wondrous thing A man may be'twixt ape and Plato; 'Tis the man who with a bird, Wren, or Eagle, finds his way to All its instincts; he hath heard The Lion's roaring, and can tell What his horny throat expresseth, And to him the Tiger's yell Comes articulate and presseth On his ear like mother-tongue. Such again are the several passages in which he expressed a mood that frequently beset him, that of being rapt in spirit too high above earth to breathe, too far above his body not to feel an awful intoxication and fear of coming madness:--