I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
  Not so much honouring thee,
As giving it a hope, that there
  It could not wither’d be. 
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
  And sent’st it back to me: 
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
  Not of itself, but thee.

Cunningham’s Text.

* * * * *

JOHN KEATS

39. On first looking into Chapman’s Homer.

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
  Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
  That deep-brow’d Homer rul’d as his demesne;
  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: 
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
  When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
  He star’d at the Pacific—­and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—­
  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

40. Ode to a Nightingale.

1.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
  My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
  One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
  But being too happy in thine happiness,—­
    That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
          In some melodious plot
  Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
    Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

2.

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
  Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
  Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth! 
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
  Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
    With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
          And purple-stained mouth;
  That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
    And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 

3.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
  What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
  Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
  Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
    Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
          And leaden-ey’d despairs,
  Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
    Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

4.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
  Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
  Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: 
Already with thee! tender is the night,
  And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
    Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
          But here there is no light,
  Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
    Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.