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, 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.
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