Hunt and Haydon are backbiting each other in consequence. Haydon and Reynolds are at odds. Horace Smith is offended at Hunt. Amid the jangling, diminutive Keats looms large and magnanimous. "Men should bear with each other," he says to Bailey. "There lives not the man who may not be cut up, aye, lashed to pieces on his weakest side. . . . The sure way is first to know a man's faults and then be passive if after that he insensibly draws you towards him, then you have no power no power to break the link." It is very significant that Keats, when he once made friends, held them to the end.

"Endymion" was finished at Burford Bridge. He went up Box Hill alone at night to view the moon and came back to write his last lines. It was here, too, that he first began to formulate his poetic philosophy of the imagination as the ultimate source of truth.

The strain is over. The revision and fair copy for the printer can be made in the cool of the blood. Keats gives himself over to diversion is much in London. He goes the rounds with the gay. One night he is "dyin' scarlet" with some boon comrades. Another night he takes a peep into the green-room of a theatre. A third he attends Haydon's dinner, meeting Wordsworth,

Lamb, Landseer; the "immortal dinner" at which Lamb played tipsy and held the candle in the face of the bumptious commissioner of stamps. During the Christmas holidays he entertains his little sister Fanny in town. One sees him, in fancy, holding her hand as they crowd with the other children into the pantomime. This affection for the orphan sister is one of his exquisite unwritten poems. In this period he writes a sonnet on the Nile in competition with Hunt and Shelley. He also attends Hazlitt's lectures on the English poets and records that there are three great things in the present age: Wordsworth's "Excursion," Haydon's pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of taste. There is more revelry. On one occasion he goes to a dance party, where the host has “eight dozen” in reserve for the unquenchables. The night passes in racketing, drinking and cutting for halfguineas uproar the only music." Yet the carouse must have been canonical; for Bailey was there and enjoyed himself. Two things in these days bring pleasure and pain: a rumor from the West country of his poetic fame; the discovery of the mortal Wordsworth, his stiff choker collars and his "egotistical sublime."

66

Three books of "Endymion" are in the hands

of the publisher. With the fourth still to revise he goes for a tour in Devon, "the splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod country." Here he wrote the fine fragment of the "Ode to Maia." Here he lay awake in the dark, listening to the rain with the sensation of rotting like a grain of wheat. On this trip, too, he saw the Devonshire girl at the inn-door, the picture of whom, in imagination, kept him warm during a chilly ride.

Where be ye going, you Devon maid?
And what have ye there in the Basket?
Ye tight little fairy just fresh from the dairy,
Will ye give me some cream if I ask it? —

This is the phase of his "yeasting youth." It has its revels and raptures. But the heart-aches and agonies are not far distant. Finance is grimstaring. His brother George is about to emigrate to America and break the family tie. Poor Tom also will soon emigrate to his final home. Already Keats is brooding on that theme which so fascinated him later, -the thought of his own death. When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has gleaned the teeming brain

That bodeful sonnet belongs to these days. The "Chamber of Maiden Thought" is darkening. Its windows are revealing "the mist—the burden