It is an awful mission, A terrible division; And leaves a gulph austere To be fill'd with worldly fear. Aye, when the soul is fled Too high above our head, Affrighted do we gaze After its airy maze, As doth a mother wild, When her young infant child Is in eagle's claws-- And is not this the cause Of madness?--God of Song, Thou bearest me along Through sights I scarce can bear; O let me, let me share With the hot lyre and thee, The staid Philosophy. Temper my lonely hours, And let me see thy bowers More unalarm'd! But our main business in this chapter must be not with illuminating snatches such as these, but with things begun of set purpose and not carried through. When Keats, drawing near the end of his work on _Endymion_, was meditating what he meant to be his second long and arduous poem, _Hyperion_, he still thought and spoke of it as a 'romance.' But a phrase he uses elsewhere shows him conscious that its style would have to be more 'naked and Grecian' than that of _Endymion_. Was he trying an experiment in the naked and Grecian style when on May day 1818 he wrote at Teignmouth the beginning of an ode on Maia? He never went on with it, and the fragment as it stands is of fourteen lines only; but these are in a more truly Greek manner than anything else he wrote, not even excepting, as I have just said, the _Ode to Autumn_. The words figuring what Greek poets were and did for Greek communities, and expressing the aspiration to be even as they, bear the true, the classic, mint-mark of absolute economy and simplicity in absolute rightness. Considering how meagre are the hints antiquity has left us concerning Maia, the eldest of the Pleiades and mother of Hermes, and her late identification with the Roman divinity to whom sacrifice was paid on the first of May, and hence how little material for development the theme seems to offer,--considering these things, perhaps it is as well that Keats, despite his promise to finish it 'all in good time,' should have tantalized posterity by breaking off this beautiful thing where he did.