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, which, during the whole of his poetic life, he worshipped intellectually and spiritually.  “The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness,” he writes to his brother George; and the last two well-known lines of the Ode on a Grecian Urn fairly sum up his philosophy—­

    Beauty is truth, truth Beauty, that is all
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

So that the moon represents to Keats the eternal idea, the one essence in all.  This is how he writes of it, in what is an entirely mystical passage in Endymion—­

     ...  As I grew in years, still didst thou blend
    With all my ardours:  thou wast the deep glen;
    Thou wast the mountain-top, the sage’s pen,
    The poet’s harp, the voice of friends, the sun;
    Thou wast the river, thou wast glory won;
    Thou wast my clarion’s blast, thou wast my steed,
    My goblet full of wine, my topmost deed: 
    Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!

In his fragment of Hyperion, Keats shadows forth the unity of all existence, and gives magnificent utterance to the belief that change is not decay, but the law of growth and progress.  Oceanus, in his speech to the overthrown Titans, sums up the whole meaning as far as it has gone, in verse which is unsurpassed in English—­

    We fall by course of Nature’s law, not force
    Of thunder, or of Jove ...
     ... 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 ...
    ... for ’tis the eternal law
    That first in beauty should be first in might.

This is true mysticism, the mysticism Keats shares with Burke and Carlyle, the passionate belief in continuity of essence through ever-changing forms.

Chapter III

Nature Mystics