depicts the
growth even in an individual life, and describes the three stages of
thought, or attitudes towards life, through which the poet must pass.
They are not quite parallel to the three stages of the mystical ladder
marked out by Wordsworth in the main body of his poetry, because they do
not go quite so far, but they are almost exactly analogous to the three
stages of mind he describes in _Tintern Abbey_. The first is mere animal
pleasure and delight in living--

A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;
A laughing school-boy without grief or care
Hiding the springy branches of an elm.

Then follows simple unreflective enjoyment of Nature. The next stage is
sympathy with human life, with human grief and joy, which brings a sense
of the mystery of the world, a longing to pierce it and arrive at its
meaning, symbolised in the figure of the charioteer.

Towards the end of Keats's life this feeling was growing stronger; and
it is much dwelt upon in the _Revision of Hyperion_. There he plainly
states that the merely artistic life, the life of the dreamer, is
selfish; and that the only way to gain real insight is through contact
and sympathy with human suffering and sorrow; and in the lost Woodhouse
transcript of the _Revision_, rediscovered in 1904, there are some lines
in which this point is still further emphasised. The full realisation of
this third stage was not granted to Keats during his short life; he had
but gleams of it. The only passage where he describes the ecstasy of
vision is in _Endymion_ (bk. i., 1. 774 ff.), and this resembles in
essentials all the other reports of this experience given by mystics.
When the mind is ready, anything may lead us to it--music, imagination,
love, friendship.

Feel we these things?--that moment have we stept
Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit's.

Keats felt this passage was inspired, and in a letter to Taylor in
January 1818 he says, "When I wrote it, it was a regular stepping of the
Imagination towards a truth."

In _Endymion_, the underlying idea is the unity of the various elements
of the individual soul; the love of woman is shown to be the same as the
love of beauty; and that in its turn is identical with the love of the
principle of beauty in all things. Keats was always very sensitive to
the mysterious effects of moonlight, and so for him the moon became a
symbol for the great abstract principle of beauty, whi