The next fragment we come to is colossal,--it is _Hyperion_ itself. From the poem as far as it was written no reader could guess either that it was taken up as a 'feverous relief' from tendance on his dying brother, or that in continuing it later under Brown's roof he had to put force upon himself against the intrusion of private cares and affections upon his thoughts, as well as against a reaction from his own mode of conceiving and handling the task itself. The impression _Hyperion_ makes is one, as Woodhouse on first reading it justly noted, of serene mastery by the poet both over himself and over his art:--'It has an air of calm grandeur about it which is indicative of true power': and again,--'the above lines give but a faint idea of the sustained grandeur and quiet power which characterize the poem.' Woodhouse goes on to tell what he knew of the scheme of the work as Keats had first conceived it:-- The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former God of the Sun, by Apollo,--and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, etc., and of the war of the giants for Saturn's reestablishment-- with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the Poet's brain. The statement inserted by the publishers at the head of the volume in which the poem appeared in 1820, that _Hyperion_ was intended to be as long as _Endymion_, is probably also due to Woodhouse, their right-hand man (Keats, we know, had nothing to do with it), and may represent what he had gathered in conversation to have been the poet's original idea. Mr de Selincourt has shown grounds for inferring that when Keats came to actual grips with the subject he decided to treat it much more briefly and partially. Clearly the essential meaning of the story was for him symbolical; it meant the dethronement of an older and ruder worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers. Into this story the poet plunges, not even in the middle but near the close. When his poem opens, the younger gods, the Olympians, have won their victory, and the Titans, all except Hyperion, are already overthrown. In their debate whether to fight again general despondency prevails, and only one of the fallen, Enceladus, strikes a note of defiance; so that it seems as if there were nothing left to tell except the coming defeat or abdication of Hyperion in favour of Apollo. Hyperion, it is true, has not yet spoken when we are called away from the council, and Keats might have made him side with Enceladus and rouse his brethren to a temporary renewal of the strife. Or leaving the Titans conquered, he might, as Woodhouse suggests, have gone on to narrate the second warfare, that waged against the Olympians not by them but later by the Giants in revolt.