For the influence of the Marbles on Keats’s poetry, see S. A. Larrabee, English Bards and Grecian Marbles (1943), pp. 209–32, and Jack, pp. 31–6 passim.

14 shadow of a magnitude ‘the conception of something so great that it can only be dimly apprehended’ (Allott). Possibly the scientific sense of ‘magnitude’ (a system of classification applied to the stars, ranging them in order of brilliancy), current from the Renaissance onwards, is relevant. So used by Milton, Paradise Lost VII, 356–7, ‘then formd the Moon / Globose, and everie magnitude of Starrs’.

TO B. R. HAYDON, WITH A SONNET WRITTEN ON SEEING THE ELGIN MARBLES

Written before 3 March 1817. See headnote to preceding poem, with which Keats was unsatisfied. This is a second attempt at the theme. Published in the Examiner and the Champion, 9 March 1817; reprinted Annals of the Fine Arts, April 1818,1848. Text based on the Examiner.

2 on] of 1848.

8 freak several meanings of the word are present: 1. a monstrosity in nature, 2. a product of irregular fancy (1784 onwards), 3. a prank, or caper (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Keats is stressing the gap between his youthful powers and the immensity of his subject.

12 browless idiotism ‘without shame, unabashed’ (OED), a seventeenth-century usage. Idiotism means ignorance, vulgarity. For ‘browless’ 1848 has ‘brainless’.

12 o’erwise ] o’erweening Keats’s MS (Harvard); and o’erwise 1848.

ON ‘THE STORY OF RIMINI’

Written before 25 March 1817 (see L I, p. 127). Published 1848. Hunt was revising The Story of Rimini, which was reprinted in 1817, and Keats was living a few minutes away in Well Walk.

8 moon, if that her hunting be begun the moon is seen in its role as Diana, the huntress.

ON A LEANDER GEM WHICH MISS REYNOLDS, MY KIND FRIEND, GAVE ME

Probably written March 1817, though dated March 1816 in the autograph MS. Published Gem (1829); reprinted Galignani. Keats met the Reynolds family late in 1816, and his relationship with the sisters was to continue until Fanny Brawne appeared. Jane Reynolds married Thomas Hood in 1825. The other sisters were Marianne, Eliza, and Charlotte, who was only fourteen. Keats wrote several poems to the sisters (see ‘Spenser! a jealous honourer of thine’, To Mrs Reynolds’s Cat, ‘Hush, hush! tread softly…’, and possibly ‘I had a dove’ and To the Ladies who Saw Me Crowned). On a Leander Gem acknowledged Jane Reynolds’s gift of one of James Tassie’s reproductions of ancient gems: for an illustration of a ‘Leander Gem’ see Jack (Plate IXb).

Title] G (a conflation of MSS titles).

2 –ay, ] G; –aye autograph (Harvard); aye, Gem, Galignani; ay, Allott.

5 Are ye ] autograph (Harvard), Allott; As if Gem, G. The MS may be meant to read ‘So gentle are ye’ (Texts, pp. 135–6).

13 Dead-heavy compare with the passage quoted from Cowden Clarke in headnote, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (p.