Thomas Bulfinch (1796–1867). Age of Fable: Vols. I & II: Stories of Gods and Heroes. 1913.

XXVI. a. Diana and Endymion

ENDYMION was a beautiful youth who fed his flock on Mount Latmos. One calm, clear night Diana, the moon, looked down and saw him sleeping. The cold heart of the virgin goddess was warmed by his surpassing beauty, and she came down to him, kissed him, and watched over him while he slept.

Another story was that Jupiter bestowed on him the gift of perpetual youth united with perpetual sleep. Of one so gifted we can have but few adventures to record. Diana, it was said, took care that his fortunes should not suffer by his inactive life, for she made his flock increase, and guarded his sheep and lambs from the wild beasts.

The story of Endymion has a peculiar charm from the human meaning which it so thinly veils. We see in Endymion the young poet, his fancy and his heart seeking in vain for that which can satisfy them, finding his favorite hour in the quiet moonlight, and nursing there beneath the beams of the bright and silent witness the melancholy and the ardor which consumes him. The story suggests aspiring and poetic love, a life spent more in dreams than in reality, and an early and welcome death.—S. G. B.

The “Endymion” of Keats is a wild and fanciful poem, containing some exquisite poetry, as this, to the moon:

“…The sleeping kine

Couched in thy brightness dream of fields divine.

Innumerable mountains rise, and rise,

Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes,

And yet thy benediction passeth not

One obscure hiding-place, one little spot

Where pleasure may be sent; the nested wren

Has thy fair face within its tranquil ken;” etc., etc.

Dr. Young, in the “Night Thoughts,” alludes to Endymion thus:

“…These thoughts, O night, are thine;

From thee they came like lovers’ secret sighs,

While others slept. So Cynthia, poets feign,

In shadows veiled, soft, sliding from her sphere,

Her shepherd cheered, of her enamoured less

Than I of thee.”

Fletcher, in the “Faithful Shepherdess,” tells:

“How the pale Phœbe, hunting in a grove,

First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes

She took eternal fire that never dies;

How she conveyed him softly in a sleep,

His temples bound with poppy, to the steep

Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,

Gilding the mountain with her brother’s light,

To kiss her sweetest.”

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