I had a message from you through a letter to Jane-I think, about Cripps. There can be no idea of binding until a sufficient sum is sure for him and even then the thing should be maturely considered by all his helpers. I shall try my luck upon as many fat purses as I can meet with. Cripps is improving very fast: I have the greater hopes of him because he is so slow in development. A man of great executing powers at twenty, with a look and a speech almost stupid, is sure to do something.

I have just looked through the second side of your letter. I feel a great content at it.

I was at Hunt's the other day, and he surprised me with a real authenticated lock of Milton's Hair. I know you would like what I wrote thereon, so here it is-as they say of a Sheep in a Nursery Book :

Chief of organic numbers!
Old Scholar of the Spheres!
Thy spirit never slumbers,

But rolls about our ears

For ever and for ever!

O what a mad endeavour

Worketh He,

Who to thy sacred and ennobled hearse
Would offer a burnt sacrifice of verse
And melody.

How heaven-ward thou soundest !

Live Temple of sweet noise,
And Discord unconfoundest,

Giving Delight new joys,

And Pleasure nobler pinions :
O where are thy dominions?

Lend thine ear

To a young Delian oath—aye, by thy soul,
By all that from thy mortal lips did roll,
And by the kernel of thy earthly love,
Beauty in things on earth and things above.
I swear!

When every childish fashion
Has vanished from my rhyme,
Will I, grey gone in passion,
Leave to an after-time,

Hymning and Harmony

Of thee and of thy works, and of thy life;
But vain is now the burning and the strife;
Pangs are in vain, until I grow high-rife
With old Philosophy,

And wed with glimpses of futurity.

For many years my offerings must be hush'd;
When I do speak, I'll think upon this hour,
Because I feel my forehead hot and flushed,
Even at the simplest vassal of thy power,
A lock of thy bright hair,-

Sudden it came,

And I was startled when I caught thy name
Coupled so unaware;

Yet at the moment temperate was my blood

I thought I had beheld it from the flood!

This I did at Hunt's, at his request. Perhaps I should

have done something better alone and at home.

I have sent my first Book to the press, and this afternoon

VOL. I.

F

shall begin preparing the second. My visit to you will be a great spur to quicken the proceeding. I have not had your sermon returned. I long to make it the subject of a letter to you. What do they say at Oxford?

I trust you and Gleig pass much fine time together. Remember me to him and Whitehead. My brother Tom is getting stronger, but his spitting of blood continues.

I sat down to read "King Lear" yesterday, and felt the greatness of the thing up to the writing of a sonnet preparatory thereto in my next you shall have it.

There were some miserable reports of Rice's health—I went, and lo! Master Jemmy had been to the play the night before, and was out at the time. He always comes on his legs like a cat.

I have seen a good deal of Wordsworth. Hazlitt is lecturing on Poetry at the Surrey Institution. I shall be there next Tuesday.

Your most affectionate friend,
JOHN KEATS.

The assumption, in the above lines, of Beauty being "the kernel" of Milton's love, rather accords with the opinion of many of Keats's friends, that at this time he had not studied "Paradise Lost," as he did afterwards. His taste would naturally have rather attracted him to those poems which Milton had drawn out of the heart of old mythology, "Lycidas" and "Comus;" and those "two exquisite jewels, hung, as it were, in the ears of antiquity," the "Penseroso" and "Allegro," had no doubt been well enjoyed; but his

full appreciation of the great Poem was reserved for the period which produced "Hyperion" as clearly under Miltonic influence, as "Endymion" is imbued with the spirit of Spenser, Fletcher, and Ben Jonson.

On the 31st January, after a page of doggerel not worth transcription, he sent Mr. Reynolds the last sonnet he had written, and he never wrote one more beautiful or more affecting in its personal relations.

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high pilèd books, in charact❜ry,

Hold like full garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace

Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love !-then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

HAMPSTEAD, Feb. 3, 1818.

MY DEAR REYNOLDS,

I thank you for your dish of filberts. Would I could get a basket of them by way of dessert every day for the sum of twopence (two sonnets on Robin Hood sent by the twopenny post). Would we were a sort of ethereal pigs, and turned loose to feed upon spiritual mast and acorns! which would be merely being a squirrel and feeding upon filberts; for what is a squirrel but an airy pig, or a filbert

but a sort of archangelical acorn? About the nuts being worth cracking, all I can say is, that where there are a throng of delightful images ready drawn, simplicity is the only thing. It may be said that we ought to read our contemporaries, that Wordsworth, &c., should have their due from us. But, for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims of an egotist?] Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing. Sancho will invent a journey heavenward as well as anybody. We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! How would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway, crying out, “Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!" Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this each of the moderns, like an Elector of Hanover, governs his petty state, and knows how many straws are swept daily from the causeways in all his dominions, and has a continual itching that all the housewives should have their coppers well scoured. The ancients were Emperors of vast provinces; they had only heard of the remote ones, and scarcely cared to visit them. I will cut all this. will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular.