America. He could play cards or dance with real pleasure, as shows in his comment on another: "Rice said he cared less about the hour than any one, and the proof is his dancing-he cares not for time, dancing as if he was deaf." Also he could fight, when necessary, as appears from his thrashing a butcher's boy who was acting the bully.

Nor was this high-strung, sensitive poet by any means above the more sensuous pleasures of humanity. He liked good eating and said so with the utmost frankness. Partridge appealed to him as it does to the more prosaic: "I forgot game-I must plead guilty to the breast of a partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a pheasant and a woodcock passim." And he liked the food washed down with good liquor. Even the grosser forms were not rejected. Whiskey? There is something to be said for whiskey. But claret was his special delight, and he refers to it repeatedly: "For really 'tis so fine-it fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness-then goes down cool and feverless-then you do not feel it quarreling with your liver-no, it is rather a peacemaker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape." He even lets it at times get the better of him, rather deliberately: "We had a claret feast

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—but pleasantly so-I enjoy claret to a degree.” ▾ Which does not mean that he was in any possible sense a winebibber.

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Before tuberculosis struck him, he seems to have had health sufficient to meet all reasonable demands upon it. No doubt his demands were not always reasonable and the carelessness of youth hastened and accentuated the end. The importance of health, what it meant, how absolutely necessary it was for achieving the great things he aimed at, he understood as well as any one. "Nothing is so bad as want of health-it makes one envy scavengers and cinder-sifters," he cried when he had lost it. But he did not need to lose it to appreciate it. He advises others most judiciously as to the care of it, and he sighs over the sense of what its fulness and perfection would do for him: "I think if I had a free and healthy and lasting organization of heart, and lungs as strong as an ox's so as to be able to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation without weariness, I could pass my life very nearly alone though it should last eighty years." "

In the most practical and necessary of all life's concerns, if not the most interesting or inviting, money and business, Keats does not appear to have

been wholly shrewd or successful. With his tastes and tendencies there was a constant temptation to spend, and as he was situated there was little for spending. He expresses an indifference and disregard to money which are noble and admirable: "It may be a proud sentence; but by Heaven I am as entirely above all matters of interest as the sun is above the earth." 10 Unfortunately one cannot live wholly without it, however. There were bills to be paid which were most pressing and most annoying. Also there was the constant importunity and the constant need of friends, and it is notable how greatly Keats was involved in supplying these, how the impecunious seemed to turn to him, and how much of his financial distress was connected with the effort to take care of them. "When I offered you assistance I thought I had it in my hand; I thought I had nothing to do but to do. . . I assure you I have harassed myself ten times more than if I alone had been concerned in so much gain or loss." 11 To which it should be added that his friends were equally ready to help him and to stand by him in his needs and difficulties. But it should further be appreciated that whether he spent or whether he lent or whether he borrowed, he was scrupulous and conscientious, knew his obli

gations and tried to fulfil them, and wished others to understand that it was so. He writes to his publishers: "I am sure you are confident of my responsibility, and in the sense of squareness that is always in me." 12 We could not ask a poet, or a man of business, to be more practical than that. These financial relations show how intimately Keats's life was bound up with that of others, and it is impossible not to feel that in his general human dealings he was as fundamentally sane and normal as in other respects. To be sure, he was always busy, intensely preoccupied with great hopes that life was not long enough to realize, and the little distractions that humanity carries with it were sometimes vexatious. A houseful of children may be charming, but it is not conducive to work: "The servant has come for the little Browns this morning-they have been a toothache to me which I shall enjoy the riddance of Their little voices are like wasps' stings- Sometimes am I all wound with Browns." 18 Moreover, like most self-conscious persons he was shy and diffident, immensely aware of his own self in any social gathering and inclined to exaggerate the importance of that self to others, who probably thought little about it. "Think of my pleasure in solitude in

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