instance, the following from the "Tempest" never struck me so forcibly as at present: Urchins Shall, for the vast of night that they may work, All exercise on thee. How can I help bringing to your mind the line In the dark backward and abysm of time. I find I cannot exist without Poetry-without eternal Poetry; half the day will not do-the whole of it; I began with a little, but habit has made me a leviathan. I had become all in a tremble from not having written anything of late: the Sonnet over-leaf did me good; I slept the better last night for it; this morning, however, I am nearly as bad again. Just now I opened Spenser, and the first lines I saw were these The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought, And is with child of glorious great intent, Can never rest until it forth have brought Let me know particularly about Haydon, ask him to write to me about Hunt, if it be only ten lines. I hope all is well. I shall forthwith begin my "Endymion," which I hope I shall have got some way with by the time you come, when we will read our verses in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near the Castle. Give my love to your sisters severally. Your sincere friend John Keats The reference in the last paragraph is obviously to the real Endymion, to be published in the following year. VIII. To LEIGH HUNT. Margate, 10 May 1817. My dear Hunt, The little gentleman that sometimes lurks in a gossip's bowl, ought to have come in the very likeness of a roasted crab, and choaked me outright for not answering your letter ere this: however, you must not suppose that I was in town to receive it: no, it followed me to the Isle of Wight, and I got it just as I was going to pack up for Margate, for reasons which you anon shall hear. On arriving at this treeless affair, I wrote to my brother George to request C[harles] C[owden] C[larke] to do the thing you wot of respecting Rimini; and George tells me he has undertaken it with great pleasure; so I hope there has been an understanding between you for many proofs: C. C. C. is well acquainted with Bensley. why did you not send the key of your cupboard, which, I know, was full of papers? We would have locked them all in a trunk, together with those you told me to destroy, which indeed I did not do, for fear of demolishing receipts, there not being a more unpleasant thing in the world (saving a thousand and one others) than to pay a bill twice. Mind you, old Wood's a " very varmint," Now This letter first appeared, with some omissions, in Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries. Thornton Hunt supplied the blanks in editing his father's Correspondence. There are many variations, besides; and I have followed in each case what seemed the likelier reading. Leigh Hunt, for instance, makes Margate a treeless affair, Thornton Hunt makes it a treeless place: the father makes old Wood sharded in covetousness-the son shrouded. shrouded in covetousness :—and now I am upon a horrid subject-what a horrid one you were upon last Sunday, and well you handled it. The last Examiner was a battering-ram against Christianity, blasphemy, Tertullian, Erasmus, Sir Philip Sidney; and then the dreadful Petzelians' and their expiation by blood; and do Christians shudder at the same thing in a newspaper which they attribute to their God in its most aggravated form? What is to be the end of this? I must mention Hazlitt's Southey. O that he had left out the grey hairs; or that they had been in any other paper not concluding with such a thunderclap! That sentence about making a page of the feeling of a whole life, appears to me like a whale's back in the sea of prose. I ought to have said a word on Shakspeare's Christianity. There are two which I have not looked over with you, touching the thing the one for, the other against: that in favour is in Measure for Measure, Act II, Scene 2, Isab. Alas, alas! Why all the souls that were, were forfeit once; And he that might the 'vantage best have took, That against is in Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 2, Maria. For there is no Christian that means to be saved by believing rightly, can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness. Before I come to the Nymphs, I must get through all disagreeables. I went to the Isle of Wight, thought so much about poetry, so long together, that I could not get to sleep at night; and, moreover, I know not how it was, I could not get wholesome food. By this means, in a week or so, I became not over capable in my upper stories, and set off pell-mell for Margate, at least a hun 1 See Appendix on The Examiner for the 4th of May 1817. dred and fifty miles, because, forsooth, I fancied that I should like my old lodging here, and could contrive to do without trees. Another thing, I was too much in solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only resource.1 However, Tom is with me at present, and we are very comfortable. We intend, though, to get among some trees. How have you got on among them? How are the Nymphs? I suppose they have led you a fine dance. Where are you now?-in Judea, Cappadocia, or the parts of Libya about Cyrene? Stranger from "Heaven, Hues, and Prototypes," I wager you have given several new turns to the old saying, "Now the maid was fair and pleasant to look on," as well as made a little variation in "Once upon a time." Perhaps, too, you have rather varied, "Here endeth the first lesson." Thus I hope you have made a horseshoe business of "unsuperfluous life," "faint bowers," and fibrous roots. I vow that I have been down in the mouth lately at this work. These last two days, however, I have felt more confident-I have asked myself so often why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is,-how great things are to be gained by it, what a thing to be in the mouth of Fame,-that at last the idea has grown so monstrously beyond my seem 1 His friend Dilke characterizes this passage, from I went, as "An exact picture of the man's mind and character," adding, " He could at any time have thought himself out' mind and body. Thought was intense with him, and seemed at times to assume a reality that influenced his conduct—and I have no doubt helped to wear him out." 2 Shelley, writing to Hunt ten months later, says "I have read Foliage, with most of the poems I am already familiar. What a delightful poem the 'Nymphs' is especially the second part. It is truly poetical, in the intense and emphatic sense of the word." (Prose Works, Volume IV, page 4.) ing power of attainment, that the other day I nearly consented with myself to drop into a Phaeton. Yet 'tis a disgrace to fail, even in a huge attempt; and at this moment I drive the thought from me. I began my poem about a fortnight since, and have done some every day, except travelling ones. Perhaps I may have done a good deal for the time, but it appears such a pin's point to me, that I will not copy any out. When I consider that so many of these pin-points go to form a bodkin-point, (God send I end not my life with a bare bodkin, in its modern sense!) and that it requires a thousand bodkins to make a spear bright enough to throw any light to posterity, I see nothing but continual up-hill journeying. Now is there any thing more unpleasant (it may come among the thousand and one) than to be so journeying and to miss the goal at last? But I intend to whistle all these cogitations into the sea, where I hope they will breed storms violent enough to block up all exit from Russia. Does Shelley go on telling strange stories of the deaths of kings? Tell him, there are strange stories of the deaths of poets. Some have died before they were con 1 Hunt records that " Mr. Shelley was fond of quoting the passage here alluded to in Shakspeare, and of applying it in the most unexpected manner. For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground, And tell strange stories of the deaths of kings. Going with me to town once in the Hampstead stage, in which our only companion was an old lady, who sat silent and stiff after the English fashion, he startled her into a look of the most ludicrous astonishment by saying abruptly; 'Hunt, For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground,' &c. The old lady looked on the coach-floor, as if she expected to see us take our seats accordingly." Hunt adds "The reader ... will be touched by the melancholy anticipations that follow, and that are |