Note 494 — CANTO THE FOURTH[375]
Reading edition
{415} [The word "nympholepsy" may be paraphrased as "ecstatic vision." The Greeks feigned that one who had seen a nymph was henceforth possessed by her image, and beside himself with longing for an impossible ideal. Compare stanza cxxii. line 7—"The unreached Paradise of our despair." Compare, too, Kubla Khan, lines 52, 53—
"For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise."]