Neptune a la fourche estofee De trois crampons vint se mesler Par la troupe contre Typhee Qui rouoit une fonde en l'air: Ici Phoebus d'un trait qu'il jette Fit Encelade trebucher, La Porphyre lui fit broncher Hors des poings l'arc et la sagette. For such an epic theme Keats felt instinctively, when he set to work, that an epic and not a romance treatment was necessary; and for an English poet the obvious epic model is Milton. Ever since his visit to Bailey at Oxford, and especially during his stay at Teignmouth the next year, Keats had been absorbing Milton and taking him into his being, as formerly he had taken Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, and now he can utter his own thoughts and imaginations almost with Milton's voice. Speaking generally of the blank verse of _Hyperion_, its rhythms are almost as full and sonorous as Milton's own, but simpler; its march more straightforward, with less of what De Quincey calls 'solemn planetary wheelings'; its periods do not sweep through such complex evolutions to so stately and far foreseen a close. The Miltonisms in _Hyperion_ are rather matters of diction and construction--construction almost always derived from the Latin--than of rhythm: sometimes also they are matters of direct verbal echo and reminiscence. To take a single instance out of many:-- For as among us mortals omens drear Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he. It is only in _Hyperion_ that Keats habitually thus puts the noun Latin-wise before the adjective: and the omens that 'perplex' are derived from the eclipse which in _Paradise Lost_ 'with fear of change Perplexes monarchs.' Throughout the fragment Keats uses frequently and with fine effect the Miltonic figure of the 'turn' or rhetorical iteration of identical words to a fresh purport, as in that noble phrase which seems to have inspired one of the finest passages in Shelley's _Defence of Poesy_[3]: How beautiful, if Sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self. It has been said, and justly, that Keats has done nothing greater than the debate of the fallen Titans in their cave of exile, modelled frankly in its main outlines on that of the rebel angels in _Paradise Lost_, but with the personages and utterances nevertheless entirely his own. In creating and animating these colossal figures between the elemental and the human, what masterly imaginative instinct does he show--to take one point only--in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realise their voices. Thus of the murmuring of the assembled gods when Saturn is about to speak:-- There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise Among immortals when a God gives sign, With hushing finger, how he means to load His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, With thunder, and with music, and with pomp: Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines.