epared.

'Endymion, the cave is secreter
Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir
No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise
Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys
And trembles through my labyrinthine hair.'

"By this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the
meaning of his sentences and the structure of his lines. We now
present them with some of the new words with which, in imitation
of Mr. Leigh Hunt, he adorns our language.

"We are told that turtles _passion_ their voices; that an arbour
was _nested_, and a lady's locks _gordianed_ up; and, to supply
the place of the nouns thus verbalized, Mr. Keats, with great
fecundity, spawns new ones, such as men-slugs and human
_serpentry_, the _honey-feel_ of bliss, wives prepare
_needments_, and so forth.

"Then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their
natural tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads.
Thus the wine out-sparkled, the multitude up-followed, and night
up-took; the wind up-blows, and the hours are down-sunken. But,
if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs, he compensates the
language with adverbs and adjectives which he separates from the
parent stock. Thus a lady whispers _pantingly_ and close, makes
_hushing_ signs, and steers her skiff into a _ripply_ cove, a
shower falls _refreshfully_, and a vulture has a _spreaded_ tail.

"But enough of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte. If any one
should be bold enough to purchase this 'Poetic Romance,' and so
much more patient than ourselves as to get beyond the first book,
and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him
to make us acquainted with his success. We shall then return to
the task which we now abandon in despair, and endeavour to make
all due amends to Mr. Keats and to our readers."

Such is the too famous article in _The Quarterly Review_. If its
contents are to be assessed with perfect calmness, I should have to say
that it is not mistaken in alleging that the poem of "Endymion" is
rambling and indistinct; that Keats allowed himself to drift too readily
according to the bidding of his rhymes (Leigh Hunt has acknowledged as
much, in independent remarks of his own); that many words are coined,
and badly coined; and that the versification is not free from
blemishes--although several of the lines quoted by _The