It will be seen that I give several poems which are not included by other editors; and most of these are from manuscript sources. Sharing Eve's Apple and the humorous ballad of The Gadfly are, I think, the most noteworthy of the poems I have been able to add to what we already possessed of Keats's work; but, seeing how great an interest must always attach to even the minor and lighter efforts of such a poet as Keats, I have been glad to rescue from oblivion such versicles as the lines On Death, the Stanzas to Miss Wylie, A Song about Myself, the Sonnet to George Keats, written in Sickness, the stanzas On Oxford, A Galloway Song, the dialogue entitled Ben Nevis, that delicate little piece of brotherly trifling which I have extracted from a letter to Keats's sister and headed Two or Three, and the couplets Women, Wine and Snuff, preserved by Keats's fellow-student Henry Stephens. All these were obtained from manuscript sources-the last, sent to me by Mr. W. H. Doeg too late for the library edition; and from outlying printed sources I have collected the acrostic, Georgiana Augusta Keats, the Sonnet on hearing the Bagpipe and seeing The Stranger, A Party of Lovers, and the Sonnet on Mrs. Reynolds's Cat.

The beautiful couplets which I have gathered in from The Indicator and placed as a rejected passage of Endymion, at page 566 of the present volume, appeared with the signature "XXX"; and I am obliged to confess that it was on purely internal evidence that I placed the couplets where they are. Their manner is absolutely identical with that of the best parts of the poem; and, if Keats did not write it, there

were two men living at the time who might, as far as manner goes, have written any page of Endymion -a conclusion which few critics if any will be prepared to adopt.

Not to rest on my own judgment alone in connecting these verses with Endymion, I sent them to the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was much interested in the scheme and progress of my library edition of Keats; and in reply to my enquiry what he thought about the extract he wrote to me thus :—

...

"I remember setting eyes in my earliest days on the passage you send me, and doubtless came to the conclusion that it must be by Keats, though it had for me no such charm as attached to the wondrous Belle Dame sans Merci I can well understand Keats's rejecting this passage; since, though replete with a general luscious beauty, it is quite without such supreme value in imaginative treatment as (despite some Cockney syllabification) the passage which I suppose to have preceded it. Is there any language in which X is called anything like Keat? In such case the XXX might represent Keats."

The riddle of the meaning of this signature held out during the exchange of several letters; and later on Rossetti wrote to me:

"I should think that triple X almost certainly stands for Triplex in relation to Diana-Luna - Hecate. Keats's text-book was of course Lemprière, and much bearing that way is to be found under those headings there. Keats speaks of the triple character of Diana at the end of the Sonnet to Homer."

To this it should be added that Endymion, when his heart is divided between his Goddess as known to him and the fair Indian in whose form she disguises herself, exclaims "I have a triple soul"; and that Keats himself had certainly three public names, to wit, John Keats, Caviare, and Lucy Vaughan Lloyd, though how far he had mentally adopted the two pen-names by January 1820, I have no knowledge. Such an explanation as Rossetti's corresponds precisely in idea with a name applied by Keats's schoolfellow Cowper to Charles Cowden Clarke, in whose Recollections, speaking of Cowper, he says:"His jocular school-name for me was 'Three hundred,' in allusion to my initials C. C. C." As regards the actual fabric of the couplets, the difficulty is, not to find something there particularly like Keats's work, but to find a single turn or phrase that is not redolent of him. If one particular point is better to rest on than another, I incline to the couplet

Like the low voice of Syrinx, when she ran

Into the forests from Arcadian Pan :

which is identical in manner and phrase with a less excellent couplet retained in the early sketch meant to have been called Endymion (page 10 of this volume) :

Telling us how fair, trembling Syrinx fled

Arcadian Pan, with such a horrid dread.

Of work attributed to Keats in former editions and rejected from the present volume there is very little; but of such rejection as has been necessary an account should be rendered. The poem and sonnet given in

Lord Houghton's Aldine edition (and others) as of doubtful authenticity are both omitted because I cannot bring myself to think that Keats had anything more to do with the poem than with the sonnet, that beginning with

Pleasures lie thickest where no pleasures seem,

which is to be found among Laman Blanchard's works, and is assigned to that author in more than one anthology.' Lord Houghton has recorded his belief that the sonnet was "one of George Byron's forgeries " (Aldine edition, page 493); but at page 326, the poem commencing with the words.

What sylph-like form before my eyes,

is introduced by a suggestion that there were genuine pieces among the forgeries sold at the George Byron "autograph" auction. My own belief is that, so far as the actual documents are concerned, all were forged; but that many of them were copies, in assumed hands, of genuine documents. Some of the Shelley letters certainly were; and I think it is only a question of time how soon this particular piece of verse shall be traced to the source outside Keats's work from which George Byron copied it. The song

Stay, ruby-breasted warbler, stay,

given at page 6 of the Aldine edition, was probably

As for instance in Leigh Hunt's Book of the Sonnet, Dr. Mackay's A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry, and Mr. John Dennis's English Sonnets.

sent to Lord Houghton from America, where people go so far as to print fac-similes of George Keats's writing for fac-similes of John's-although there is not the faintest likeness between them. I omit the song because, in a scrap-book in my possession containing a mass of transcripts by George Keats from his brother's poetry, and seemingly at one time the property of Mrs. George Keats, I find this poem not only written in George's hand but signed "G. K." instead of “J. K."; and I confess I think it more likely to be one of the effusions which George is recorded to have produced than an early poem by John.

It is impossible to read Keats's poetry closely without being struck by the earnest single-heartedness of his devotion to his art. It is the most salient moral quality which his writings display, and contributes more than any cultivation of thought, study of philosophy, or adherence to the spirit of the Greek mythology, to give to his works that stability which made certain from the first what he half doubtingly ventured to "think" in writing to his brother,—that he should be "among the English poets" after his death. It was perhaps this great earnestness, over-straining his supersensitive nature, that led to most of the faults of his more youthful productions. The line of his reading was from early times the best calculated to invigorate and inspire his style; and although he fell at first into some of the laxities of early English poets, the small damage here and there effected in this way is insignificant when compared with the good he got from his studies. Spenser very soon gained a great influence

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