Hillman's invocation of Keats here is precise, not decorative. The vale of soul-making is Keats's phrase, from a letter to his brother in 1819, and it carries a specific weight: Keats was dying, watching his brother die, and the vale he named was not metaphor but condition. Soul is not made on summits. It is made in the valley, which is to say in the place where suffering has nowhere further to fall. The monks on the mountain are not villains — the ascent is real, the clarity up there is genuine, the air thins into something that genuinely feels like freedom. Hillman knows this, which is why he says "come down" rather than "you were wrong to go up." The problem is not that the mountain is false. The problem is that nothing of the soul's specific gravity forms there. The descent Hillman is pointing at is not a failure of spiritual development; it is what spiritual development has, until this moment, been avoiding. Beauty enters here too — "beautiful John Keats" — because what the valley holds is not only pain but the peculiar vividness that accompanies undefended encounter with one's own existence. That vividness is what the ascent, in all its genuine relief, costs.