Mr. Keats’s preface hints that his poem was produced under peculiar circumstances....

  The two first books, and indeed the two last, are not of such
  completion as to warrant their passing the press. p. vii.

Thus, “the two first books” are, even in his own judgment, unfit to appear, and “the two last” are, it seems, in the same condition—­and as two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books, we have a clear and, we believe, a very just estimate of the entire work.

Mr. Keats, however, deprecates criticism on this “immature and feverish” work in terms which are themselves sufficiently feverish; and we confess that we should have abstained from inflicting upon him any of the tortures of the “fierce hell” of criticism, which terrify his imagination, if he had not begged to be spared in order that he might write more; if we had not observed in him a certain degree of talent which deserves to be put in the right way, or which, at least, ought to be warned of the wrong; and if, finally, he had not told us that he is of an age and temper which imperiously require mental discipline.

Of the story we have been able to make out but little; it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion; but of this, as the scope of the work has altogether escaped us, we cannot speak with any degree of certainty:  and must therefore content ourselves with giving some instances of its diction and versification.—­ And here again we are perplexed and puzzled.—­At first it appeared to us, that Mr. Keats had been amusing himself and wearying his readers with an immeasurable game at bouts rimes; but, if we recollect rightly, it is an indispensable condition at this play, that the rhymes when filled up shall have a meaning; and our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning.  He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it concludes.  There is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a complete idea in the whole book.  He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds, and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which they turn....

  Be still the unimaginable lodge
  For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
  Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
  Then leave the naked brain:  be still the leaven,
  That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
  Gives it a touch ethereal—­a new birth. p. 17.

Lodge, dodge—­heaven, leaven—­earth, birth; such, in six words, is the sum and substance of six lines.

We come now to the author’s taste in versification.  He cannot indeed write a sentence, but perhaps he may be able to spin a line.  Let us see.  The following are specimens of his prosodial notions of our English heroic metre.