true freedom is freedom from his own individual and limited desires and aims, and when he wishes thus to command his fate, that the Ilian princess turns upon him with the face of his o beloved, and he knows that all love and beauty is one, that the truth of the finite is the truth of the infinite, that the fitful and dimly realised beauty in common, life and the beauty gained through suffering is one with the beauty of light and of joy, and that it was necessary some change should spiritualise him into this belief. Being made one with eternal and universal love, the spirit is at rest for ever.

IN Hyperion' Keats took for his theme the fall of the Titans, the dethronement by Jupiter of Saturn the son of Calus and Terra, a myth which may have represented the passing away of the elemental worship of the Greeks and the change to the worship of the Olympian deities. It was a vast subject, and one in which the complex mind of Keats would specially luxuriate. Deeply imbued as he was by this time with the true spirit of nature, he entered as few could have done into the pathos of the transition from the worship of the Titanic forces of nature to the newer dynasty in which the personification of human qualities was represented, and at the same time the growing intensity of his poetic vision and his increasing power of philosophic thought made him see the hope that linked all change with the progress of mankind.

We cannot tell what was to have been the plan of the great poem, for only two complete books and a broken fragment of a third remain to us; but it is probable that it grew from the sequence of thought in 'Endymion,' and that the idea underlying 'Hyperion' is the unity of all existence, just as 'Endymion' seems to illustrate the reconcilement of the various elements of the individual soul.

In its stately power, its dignified strength, and solemn melody, 'Hyperion' fitly represents the eternal music of the world's progress, and it is not the less suggestive from being broken off abruptly.

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Two versions of Hyperion' were menced, and by comparing them, and remembering the influences which surrounded the poet, and the increasing maturity of his thought, we are able to gather the vast idea which underlies the grand Greek myth in his mind. The workmanship in itself shows an immense advance upon 'Endymion,' though it lacks something of its freshness and originality, and is more obviously formed on models. Keats said himself

that he had been studying Dryden before he wrote it, and Spenser and Milton had long been his masters.

'Hyperion' is a more classical production than 'Endymion.' It contains no digressions or reflections, its great scenes and its great thoughts are expressed with simple force, and follow one another with purpose and meditated strength. All the words are weighed and musically appraised, they fall with fitness into their places, and seem under complete mastery, so that the effect is severe and almost unimpassioned.

From the vastness of its leading thoughts it is more removed from human interest than 'Endymion,' but it expresses entirely the subject of which it treats, for there is in it a calm and patient regret for the past mingled with the shining hope of the future.

The Titans have fallen, Saturn is deposed, the golden age is over, the 'large utterance of 'the early gods' is heard no more; but through all the changes of the many 'the One remains,' linking the Present with the Past, and both with the unknown Future.

So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,

A power more strong in beauty, born of us,
And fated to excel us as we pass,

In glory that old Darkness.

Such is surely the great prophecy of 'Hype'rion,' following upon the sweet secret of 'Endy'mion,' and in the time which elapsed between the composition of the two, the mind of the poet has passed from the vague moonlight, with its intangible hopefulness, into the strong sunlight,

Pervading all the beetling gloomy steeps,
All the sad spaces of oblivion,

And every gulf and every chasm old,
And every height and every sullen depth.

It is the great vision of him who loves his race, the poet, whose guerdon for the suffering of the present is the large hope of the future and the belief in the final triumph of light over darkness.

There is a remarkable passage in the rejected version of 'Hyperion' which shows how strongly both the love of humanity and the burden of the poet's vocation began to weigh upon the heart of Keats. This early version of the poem is called A Vision,' and the poet speaks in it in