mind and powerful feeling would, I truly believe, have done the world
some service had his life been spared--but he was of too sensitive a
nature--and thus he was destroyed! One story he completed, and that is
to me now the most pathetic poem in existence."

It was "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil."

The "Garden of Florence" is written in the couplets of "Endymion," and is
a beautiful version of the tale once more retold by Alfred de Musset in
"Simone." From "The Romance of Youth" let me quote one stanza, which
applies to Keats:

"He read and dreamt of young Endymion,
Till his romantic fancy drank its fill;
He saw that lovely shepherd sitting lone,
Watching his white flocks upon Ida's hill;
The Moon adored him--and when all was still,
And stars were wakeful--she would earthward stray,
And linger with her shepherd love, until
The hooves of the steeds that bear the car of day,
Struck silver light in the east, and then she waned away!"

It was on Latmos, not Ida, that Endymion shepherded his flocks; but that
is of no moment, except to schoolmasters. There are other stanzas of
Reynolds worthy of Keats; for example, this on the Fairy Queen:

"Her bodice was a pretty sight to see;
Ye who would know its colour,--be a thief
Of the rose's muffled bud from off the tree;
And for your knowledge, strip it leaf by leaf