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What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy Who are these coming to the sacrifice ?

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She cannot fade, though thou hast not Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' — that is thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

III

19

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love!

For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

For ever panting, and for ever young;

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

ODE ON INDOLENCE

'They toil not, neither do they spin.'

50

Published in Life, Letters and Literary Remains. In a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, dated March 19, 1819, Keats uses language which shows this poem to have been just then in his mind: This morning I am in a sort of temper, indolent and supremely careless

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I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's Castle of Indolence my passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor, but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable power. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a Greek vase a man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the Mind.'

I

ONE morn before me were three figures seen,

With bowed necks, and joined hands,

side-faced;

And one behind the other stepp'd serene, In placid sandals, and in white robes graced;

They pass'd, like figures on a marble urn, When shifted round to see the other side;

They came again; as when the urn

once more

Is shifted round, the first seen shades return;

And they were strange to me, as may betide

With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.

II

How is it, Shadows! that I knew ye

not?

How came ye muffled in so hush a mask? Was it a silent deep-disguised plot

To steal away, and leave without a task My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;

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pages [of his letter] and ask yourselves whether I have not that in me which will bear the buffets of the world. It will be the best comment on my sonnet; it will show you that it was written with no Agony but that of ignorance; with no thirst of anything but Knowledge when pushed to the point, though the first steps to it were through my human passions, they went away and I wrote with my Mind - and perhaps I must confess a little bit of my heart.'

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To George and Georgiana Keats, April 18 or 19, 1819, Keats writes: "The fifth canto of Dante pleases me more and more - it is that one in which he meets with Paolo and Francesca. I had passed many days in rather a low state of mind, and in the midst of them I dreamt of being in that region of Hell. The dream was one of the most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life. I floated about the whirling atmosphere, as it is described, with a beautiful figure, to whose lips mine were joined as it seemed for an age- and in the midst of all this cold and darkness I was warm

even flowery tree-tops sprung up, and we rested on them, sometimes with the lightness of a cloud, till the wind blew us away again. I tried a sonnet upon it- there are fourteen lines, but nothing of what I felt in it-O that I could dream it every night.' Keats afterwards printed the sonnet in The Indicator for June 28, 1820.

As Hermes once took to his feathers light, When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon'd and

slept

So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright

So play'd, so charm'd, so conquer'd, so bereft

The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;
And, seeing it asleep, so fled away
Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies,
Nor unto Tempe where Jove grieved a
day;

But to that second circle of sad hell, Where 'mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw

Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips

I saw, Pale were the lips I kiss'd, and fair the form I floated with, about that melancholy storm.

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

Sent in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, April 28, 1819, and printed by Leigh Hunt in The Indicator, May 10, 1820. Hunt says the poem was suggested by that title at the head of a translation from Alan Chartier at the end of Chaucer's works.

I

Aн, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

II

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, So haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel's granary is full,

And the harvest 's done.

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