Published 1817. The poem is the second of three addressed to Haydon: see Addressed to Haydon and To B. R. Haydon. The three ‘spirits’ celebrated are Wordsworth (2–4), Hunt (5–6) and Haydon (7–8).

3 Helvellyn mountain five miles from Grasmere, frequently referred to by Wordsworth.

6 the chain for Freedom’s sake another reference to Hunt’s imprisonment (see headnote to Written on the Day that Mr Leigh Hunt left Prison, p. 559).

13 Of mighty workings? – ] Of mighty Workings in a distant Mart? L and MS. Keats altered the line at Haydon’s suggestion, and wrote to him on 21 November 1816, ‘My feelings entirely fall in with yours in regard to the Elipsis and I glory in it’ (L I, p. 118).

‘I STOOD TIP-TOE UPON A LITTLE HILL’

Completed in December 1816. On 17 December Keats wrote to Cowden Clarke, ‘I have done little to Endymion [this poem’s original title] lately – I hope to finish it in one more attack’ (L I, p. 121). Haydon reported to Wordsworth on 31 December, Keats ‘is now writing a longer sort of poem of “Diana and Endymion” to publish with his smaller production’ (Correspondence and Table Talk, ed. P. W. Haydon [1876] II, p. 30). Probably begun in spring-summer of 1816. Published as the first poem in 1817. Hunt said the poem was suggested ‘by a delightful summer-day, as he stood beside the gate that leads from the Battery on Hampstead Heath into a field by Caen Wood’ (Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries [1828], p. 249). Ward (1963), pp. 420–21, attempts to date the progress of the poem’s composition. Lines 1–114 may have been drafted during Keats’s stay in Margate, lines 115–92 may belong to October or November, and lines 193-end were written in ‘attacks’ in December, when the whole poem was revised. It is placed here before Sleep and Poetry in the chronological, sequence: although finished later, ‘I stood tip-toe…’ was begun earlier, and is an attempt to explore the issues more fully realized in Sleep and Poetry. For a discussion, see Jones, p. 123–6. The manuscripts are widely distributed and their relationship complicated (see S, pp. 556–9). A recently discovered fragment shows Keats eliminating ‘Huntisms’ such as ‘gently’, ‘nestling’, ‘embower’, ‘dainties’, ‘delicious’, etc., from what is nevertheless his most Huntian poem: see N. Rogers and M. Steele, ‘I stood tip-toe: A Hitherto Uncollated Fragment’, K S J, X (1962), pp.