a year's time, the best metaphysical road I can take. For, although I take Poetry to be chief, yet there is something else wanting to one who passes his life among books and thoughts on books. I long to feast upon old Homer as we have upon Shakspeare, and as I have lately upon Milton. If you understand Greek, and would read me passages now and then, explaining their meaning, 'twould be, from its mistiness, perhaps, a greater luxury than reading the thing one's self. I shall be happy when I can do the same for you. I have written for my folio Shakspeare, in which there are the first few stanzas of my "Pot of Basil." I have the rest here, finished, and will copy the whole out fair shortly, and George will bring it you. The compliment is paid by us to Boccace, whether we publish or no: so there is content in this world. Mine is short; you must be deliberate about yours: you must not think of it till many months after you are quite well-then put your passion to it, and I shall be bound up with you in the shadows of mind, as we are in our matters of human life. Perhaps a stanza or two will not be too foreign to your sickness. Give my love to your mother and sisters. Remember me to the Butlers-not forgetting Sarah. Your affectionate friend, The stanzas transcribed for Rey 1 See Volume II, pages 43-4. nolds appear to have been XII, XIII, and XXX. XLV. To JOHN TAYLOR. Teignmouth, 27 April 1818. My dear Taylor, I think I did wrong to leave to you all the trouble of " Endymion." But I could not help it then-another time I shall be more bent to all sorts of troubles and disagreeables. Young men, for some time, have an idea that such a thing as happiness is to be had, and therefore are extremely impatient under any unpleasant restraining. In time, however,—of such stuff is the world about them, they know better, and instead of striving from uneasiness, greet it as an habitual sensation, a pannier which is to weigh upon them through life. And in proportion to my disgust at the task is my sense of your kindness and anxiety. The book pleased me much. It is very free from faults; and, although there are one or two words I should wish replaced, I see in many places an improvement greatly to the purpose. I was proposing to travel over the North this summer. There is but one thing to prevent me. I know nothing -I have read nothing-and I mean to follow Solomon's directions, "Get learning-get understanding.” I find earlier days are gone by—I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some do it with their society; some with their wit; some with their benevolence; some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humour on all they meet-and in a thousand ways, all dutiful to the command of great Nature. There is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it; and, for that end, purpose retiring for some years. I have been hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious, and a love for philosophy: were I calculated for the former I should be glad. But as I am not, I shall turn all my soul to the latter. My brother Tom is getting better, and I hope I shall see both him and Reynolds better before I retire from the world. I shall see you soon, and have some talk about what books I shall take with me. Your very sincere friend. John Keats Lord Houghton appends the following note to this remarkable letter: "It is difficult to add anything to the passages in these letters, which show the spirit in which 'Endymion 'was written and published. This first sustained work of a man whose undoubted genius was idolised by a circle of affectionate friends, whose weaknesses were rather encouraged than repressed by the intellectual atmosphere in which he lived, who had rarely been enabled to measure his spiritual stature with that of persons of other schools of thought and habits of mind, appears to have been produced with a humility that the severest criticism might not have engendered. Keats, it is clear, did not require to be told how far he was from the perfect Poet. The very consciousness of the capability to do something higher and better, which accompanies the lowly estimate of his work, kept the ideal ever before him, and urged him to complete it rather as a process of poetical education, than as a triumph of contented power. Never was less presumption exhibited-never the sharp stroke of contemptuous censure less required. His own dissatisfaction with his book, and his brother's ill-health, cast over his mind the gloom which he hardly conceals in the letters of this period, though it is remarkable how free they are, at all times, from any merely querulous expressions, and from the vague sentimentality attributed to some of his literary associates." XLVI. To JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS. Teignmouth, My dear Reynolds, 3 May [1818]. What I complain of is, that I have been in so uneasy a state of mind as not to be fit to write to an invalid. I cannot write to any length under a disguised feeling. I should have loaded you with an addition of gloom, which I am sure you do not want. I am now, thank God, in a humour to give you a good groat's worth; for Tom, after a night without a wink of sleep, and overburthened with fever, has got up, after a refreshing daysleep, and is better than he has been for a long time. And you, I trust, have been again round the Common without any effect but refreshment. As to the matter, I hope I can say, with Sir Andrew, "I have matter enough in my head," in your favour. And now, in the second place, for I reckon that I have finished my Imprimis, I am glad you blow up the weather. All through your letter there is a leaning towards a climate-curse; and you know what a delicate satisfaction there is in having a vexation anathematized. One would think there has been growing up, for these last four thousand years, a grand-child scion of the old forbidden tree, and that some modern Eve had just violated it; and that there was come, with double charge, "Notus and Afer, black with thundrous clouds Tom wants to be in town: we will have some such days upon the heath like that of last summer-and why not with the same book? or what say you to a black-letter Chaucer, printed in 1596? Aye, I have got one, huzza! I shall have it bound in Gothique-a nice sombre binding; it will go a little way to unmodernize. And, also, I see no reason, because I have been away this last month, why I should not have a peep at your Spenserian -notwithstanding you speak of your office, in my thought, a little too early; for I do not see why a mind like yours is not capable of harbouring and digesting the whole mystery of Law as easily as Parson Hugh does pippins, which did not hinder him from his poetic canary. Were I to study Physic, or rather Medicine again, I feel it would not make the least difference in my poetry; when the mind is in its infancy a bias is in reality a bias, but when we have acquired more strength, a bias becomes no bias. Every department of knowledge we see excellent and calculated towards a great whole. I am so convinced of this that I am glad at not having given away my medical books, which I shall again look over, to keep alive the little I know thitherwards; and moreover intend, through you and Rice, to become a sort of pip-civilian. An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people; it takes away the heat and fever, and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the "burden of the Mystery," a thing which I begin to understand a little, and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your letter. The difference of high sensations, with and without knowledge, appears to me this: in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep, and being blown up again, without wings, and with all [the] horror of a bare-shouldered creature; in the former case, our shoulders are fledged, and we go through the same air and space without fear. This is running one's rigs on |