Indeed, the idea of Tennyson's pretty song was taken from old French and English love songs of the peasants--popular ballads.

But in this beautiful sonnet of Keats, where the lover wishes to be endowed with the immortality and likeness of a star only to be forever with the beloved, there is something of the old Greek thought which inspired the beautiful lines written between two and three thousand years ago, and translated by J.A.

Symonds: Gazing on stars, my Star?
Would that I were the welkin, Starry with myriad eyes, ever to gave upon thee! But there is more than the Greek beauty of thought in Keats's sonnet, for we find the poet speaking of the exterior universe in the largest relation, thinking of the stars watching forever the rising and the falling of the sea tides, thinking of the sea tides themselves as continually purifying the world, even as a priest purifies a temple.

The fancy of the boy expands to the fancy of philosophy; it is a blending of poetry, philosophy, and sincere emotion.
You will have seen by the examples which we have been reading together that English love poetry, like Japanese love poetry, may be divided into many branches and classified according to the range of subject from the very simplest utterance of feeling up to that highest class expressing cosmic emotion.

Very rich the subject is; the student is only puzzled where to choose.