This nameless Poem, to judge by its style and matter, may be safely placed amongst the latest-written pieces in the volume of 1817, and was, doubtless, chosen by Keats as a kind of "Induction," (to use the fine Elizabethan word with which he entitled the piece next following), to his little venture. But we may take it also as a fit preface to the work which his short life enabled him to give us:--presenting, as it does, two of the leading colours or motives that appear throughout his poetry,--the passion for pure nature-painting, and the love for Hellenic myths, treated, not as the Greeks themselves treated them, but with a lavish descriptiveness which belongs to the English Renaissance movement, as represented in the Faerie Queene, and with a strong tinge of the still more modern movement, which is intelligibly summed up under the name Romantic. Upon both of these dominant features in Keats I propose to add a few words later on. Meanwhile, we may remark that already the tale of Endymion had seized on the Poet's imagination, and that his later treatment of it is shadowed forth, in essentials, in the six final paragraphs of this lovely poem.

Two other notable characteristics of Keats should be also observed: his chivalrous devotion to Woman, which is in close analogy with the tone of Milton in the Comus and the Paradise, and his singular gift in closeness and accuracy of descriptive characterization. Here he far surpasses Spenser, whose landscape, like that of the painters of his age, is seen always through a generalizing medium of literature and of human interest, and wants, as a rule, those touches, so frequent in Keats that it would be idle to quote them, which testify to immediate contact with and inspiration from Nature. If, however, the young Poet has here a point of superiority (due, in part, to the influence of his age), his landscape falls short of the landscape of Shelley in its comparative absence of the larger features of sky and earth: it is foreground work in which he excels; whilst again, in comparison with Wordsworth, Keats rests satisfied with exquisitely true delineation, and has little thought (thus far) of allying Nature with human sympathy; still less, of penetrating and rendering her deeper eternal significance.