In either case we should have seen the poet try his hand, hitherto untested in such themes, on scenes of superhuman battle and violence. Woodhouse is right at any rate in saying that the hints for handling the theme to be found in the ancient poets are few and uncertain, leaving a modern writer free to invent most of his incidents for himself. Beyond the bald notices in his classical dictionaries, Chapman's _Iliad_ would have given Keats a picture of the dethroned Saturn: Chapman's Homer's hymn to Apollo might have filled his imagination, even to overflowing, with visions of the youth of that god in Delos,--'Chief isle of the embowered Cyclades': Hesiod's _Theogony_ (which he had doubtless read in the translation of Pope's butt and enemy, Thomas Cooke) would have taught him more, but very confusedly, about the warfare of Gods, Titans, and Giants in general, besides inspiring his vision of the den where the Titans lie vanquished; while he would have gleaned other stray matters from Sandys's notes on certain passages of Ovid. As far as his beloved English poets are concerned, brief allusions occur in the _Faerie Queene_ and in _Paradise Lost_, where Milton includes the fallen Titans among the rebel hosts that flock to the standard of Satan in hell. But I think the source freshest in his mind at the moment when he began to write is one which has not hitherto been suggested, the ode of the famous French Renaissance poet Ronsard to his friend Michel de l'Hopital. We know by his translation of the sonnet _Nature ornant Cassandre_ that Keats had the works of Ronsard in his hands--lent, it would seem, by Mr Taylor--exactly about this time. The ode in question, partly founded on Hesiod, partly on Horace,[1] but largely on Ronsard's own invention, relates the birth of the Muses, their training by their mother Memoire (= Mnemosyne), their desire as young girls to visit their father Jupiter, their mother's consent, their undersea journey to the palace of Oceanus where Jupiter is present at a high festival, their choral singing before him, first of the strife of Neptune and Pallas for the soil of Attica, and then of the battle of the gods and giants:-- Apres sur la plus grosse corde D'un bruit qui tonnait jusqu'aux cieux, Le pouce des Muses accorde L'assaut des Geants et des Dieux. Keats, although he writes of the battle of the Gods not against the Giants but against the earlier Titans, yet when he rolls out rebel names like this,-- Coeus, and Gyges, and Briareus; Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion Were pent in regions of laborious breath Dungeon'd in opaque elements,-- Keats, when he rolls out these rebel names, has surely been haunted by the strophes of Ronsard:-- Styx d'un noir halecret rempare Ses bras, ses jambes, et son sein, Sa fille amenant par la main Contre Cotte, Gyge, et Briare.[2]