Minutes are flying swiftly, and as yet Nothing unearthly has enticed my brain Into a delphic labyrinth--I would fain Catch an immortal thought to pay the debt I owe to the kind poet who has set Upon my ambitious head a glorious gain. Two bending laurel sprigs--'tis nearly pain To be conscious of such a coronet. Still time is fleeting, and no dream arises Gorgeous as I would have it--only I see A trampling down of what the world most prizes, Turbans and crowns and blank regality; And then I run into most wild surmises Of all the many glories that may be. TO THE LADIES WHO SAW ME CROWNED What is there in the universal earth More lovely than a wreath from the bay tree? Haply a halo round the moon--a glee Circling from three sweet pair of lips in mirth; And haply you will say the dewy birth Of morning roses--ripplings tenderly Spread by the halcyon's breast upon the sea-- But these comparisons are nothing worth. Then there is nothing in the world so fair? The silvery tears of April? Youth of May? Or June that breathes out life for butterflies? No, none of these can from my favourite bear Away the palm--yet shall it ever pay Due reverence to your most sovereign eyes. Here we have expressed in the first sonnet the same mood as in some of the holiday rimes of the previous summer, the mood of ardent expectancy for an inspiration that declines (and no wonder considering the circumstances) to come. It was natural that the call for an impromptu should bring up phrases already lying formed or half formed in Keats's mind, and the sestet of this sonnet is interesting as containing in its first four lines the germs of the well-known passage at the beginning of the third book of _Endymion_,-- There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men With most prevailing tinsel-- and in its fifth a repetition of the 'wild surmise' phrase of the Chapman sonnet. The second sonnet has a happy line or two in its list of delights, and its opening is noticeable as repeating the interrogative formula of the opening lines of _Sleep and Poetry_, Keats's chief venture in verse this winter. Very soon after the date of this scene of intercoronation (the word is Hunt's, used on a different occasion) Keats became heartily ashamed of it, and expressed his penitence in a strain of ranting verse (his own name for compositions in this vein) under the form of a hymn or palinode to Apollo:-- God of the golden bow, And of the golden lyre, And of the golden hair, And of the golden fire, Charioteer Of the patient year, Where--where slept thine ire, When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath, Thy laurel, thy glory, The light of thy story, Or was I a worm--too low crawling, for death? O Delphic Apollo!