Forgive me for vexing you and making a Trojan horse of such a Trifle, both with respect to the matter in Question, and myself but it eases me to tell you — I could not live without the love of my friends - I would jump down Etna for any great Public good but I hate a Mawkish Popularity. I cannot be subdued before them - My glory would be to daunt and dazzle the thousand jabberers about Pictures and Books - I see swarms of Porcupines with their Quills erect like lime-twigs set to catch my Winged Book,' and I would fright them away with a torch. You will say my

Preface is not much of a Torch. It would have been too insulting to begin from Jove,' and I could not set a golden head upon a thing of clay. If there is any fault in the Preface it is not affectation, but an undersong of disrespect to the Public - if I write another Preface it must be done without a thought of those people — I will think about it. If it should not reach you in four or five days, tell Taylor to publish it without a Preface, and let the Dedication simply stand-inscribed to the Memory of Thomas Chatterton.'

I had resolved last night to write to you this morning I wish it had been about something else something to greet you towards the close of your long illness. I have had one or two intimations of your going to Hampstead for a space; and I regret to see your confounded Rheumatism keeps you in Little Britain where I am sure the air is too confined. Devonshire continues rainy. As the drops beat against the window, they give me the same sensation as a quart of cold water offered to revive a half-drowned devil-no feel of the clouds dropping fatness; but as if the roots of the earth were rotten, cold, and drenched. I have not been able to go to Kent's cave at Babbicombe however on one very beautiful day I had a fine Clamber over the rocks all along as far as that place. I shall be in Town in about Ten daysWe go by way of Bath on purpose to call

I have many reasons for going wonderways: to make my winter chair free from spleen ― to enlarge my vision to escape disquisitions on Poetry and Kingston Criticism; to promote digestion and economise shoe-leather. I'll have leather buttons and belt; and, if Brown holds his mind, over the Hills we go. If my Books will help me to it, then will I take all Europe in turn, and see the Kingdoms of the Earth and the glory of them. Tom is getting better, he hopes you may meet him at the top o' the hill. My Love to your nurses. I

am ever

Your affectionate Friend JOHN KEATS.

48. TO THE SAME

[Teignmouth,] Friday [April 10, 1818). MY DEAR REYNOLDS - I am anxious you should find this Preface tolerable. If there is an affectation in it 't is natural to me. Do let the Printer's Devil cook it, and let me be as the casing air.'

You are too good in this Matter - were I in your state, I am certain I should have no thought but of discontent and illness I might though be taught patience: I had an idea of giving no Preface; however, don't you think this had better go? O, let it -one should not be too timid of committing faults.

The climate here weighs us down completely; Tom is quite low-spirited. It is impossible to live in a country which is continually under hatches. Who would live in a region of Mists, Game Laws, indemnity Bills, etc., when there is such a place as Italy? It is said this England from its Clime produces a Spleen, able to engender the finest Sentiments, and cover the whole

50. TO JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS

Teignmouth, April 27, 1818. MY DEAR REYNOLDS -It is an awful while since you have heard from me - I hope I may not be punished, when I see you well, and so anxious as you always are for me, with the remembrance of my so seldom writing when you were so horribly confined. The most unhappy hours in our lives are those in which we recollect times past to our own blushing-If we are immortal that must be the Hell. If I must be immortal, I hope it will be after having taken a little of that watery labyrinth' in order to forget some of my school-boy days and others since those.

I have heard from George at different times how slowly you were recovering - It is a tedious thing but all Medical Men will tell you how far a very gradual amendment is preferable; you will be strong after this, never fear. We are here still enveloped in clouds-I lay awake last night listening to the Rain with a sense of being drowned and rotted like a grain of wheat. There is a continual courtesy between the Heavens and the Earth. The heavens rain down their unwelcomeness, and the Earth sends it up again to be returned to-morrow. Tom has taken a fancy to a physician here, Dr. Turton, and I think is getting bettertherefore I shall perhaps remain here some Months. I have written to George for some Books-shall learn Greek, and very likely Italian- - and in other ways prepare myself to ask Hazlitt in about a year's time the best metaphysical road I can take. For although I take poetry to be Chief, yet there is something else wanting to one who passes his life among Books and thoughts on Books I long to feast upon old Homer as we have upon Shakspeare, and as I have lately upon Milton. If you understood Greek, and would read me passages, now and then, explaining their meaning, 't would be, from its mistiness, perhaps, a greater luxury than reading the thing one's self. I

you

shall be happy when I can do the same for you. I have written for my folio Shakspeare, in which there are the first few stanzas of my 'Pot of Basil.' I have the rest here finished, and will copy the whole out fair shortly, and George will bring it - The compliment is paid by us to Boccace, whether we publish or no: SO there is content in this world-mine is short you must be deliberate about yours: you must not think of it till many months after you are quite well:- then put your passion to it, and I shall be bound up with you in the shadows of Mind, as we are in our matters of human life. Perhaps a Stanza or two will not be too foreign to your Sickness.

[Here are inserted stanzas xii., xiii., and xxx.] I heard from Rice this morning — very witty and have just written to Bailey. Don't you think I am brushing up in the letter way? and being in for it, you shall hear again from me very shortly: - if you will promise not to put hand to paper for me until you can do it with a tolerable ease of health except it be a line or two. Give my Love to your Mother and Sisters. Remember me to the Butlers not forgetting Sarah.

Teignmouth, May 3d [1818].

MY DEAR REYNOLDS-What I complain of is that I have been in so uneasy a state of Mind as not to be fit to write to an invalid. I cannot write to any length under a disguised feeling. I should have loaded you with an addition of gloom, which I am sure you do not want. I am now thank God in a humour to give you a good groat's worth for Tom, after a Night without a Wink of sleep, and over-burthened with fever, has got up after a refreshing day-sleep and is better than he has been for a long time; and you I trust

V

have been again round the common without any effect but refreshment. As to the Matter I hope I can say with Sir Andrew 'I have matter enough in my head' in your favour And now, in the second place, for I reckon that I have finished my Imprimis, I am glad you blow up the weather - all through your letter there is a leaning towards a climate-curse, and you know what a delicate satisfaction there is in having a vexation anathematised: one would think there has been growing up for these last four thousand years, a grand-child Scion of the old forbidden tree, and that some modern Eve had just violated it; and that there was come with double charge

Notus and Afer, black with thundrous clouds From Serraliona

I shall breathe worsted stockings 87 sooner than I thought for Tom wants to be in Town-we will have some such days upon the heath like that of last summer and why not with the same book? or what say you to a black Letter Chaucer, printed in 1596: aye I've got one huzza! I shall have it bound en gothique - - a nice sombre binding it will go a little way to unmodernise. And also I see no reason, because I have been away this last month, why I should not have a peep at your Spenserian-notwithstanding you speak of your office, in my thought a little too early, for I do not see why a Mind like yours is not capable of harbouring and digesting the whole Mystery of Law as easily as Parson Hugh does pippins, which did not hinder him from his poetic canary. Were I to study physic or rather Medicine again, I feel it would not make the least difference in my Poetry; when the mind is in its infancy a Bias is in reality a Bias, but when we have acquired more strength, a Bias becomes no Bias. Every department of Knowledge we see excellent and calculated towards a great whole- I am so convinced of this that I am glad at not having given away my medical Books, which I shall

again look over to keep alive the little I know thitherwards; and moreover intend through you and Rice to become a sort of pip-civilian. An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the Burden of the Mystery, a thing which I begin to understand a little, and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your Letter. The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this: in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again, without wings, and with all horror of a bare-shouldered Creature in the former case, our shoulders are fledged, and we go through the same air and space without fear. This is running one's rigs on the score of abstracted benefit - when we come to human Life and the affections, it is impossible to know how a parallel of breast and head can be drawn (you will forgive me for thus privately treading out of my depth, and take it for treading as schoolboys tread the water); it is impossible to know how far knowledge will console us for the death of a friend, and the ill that flesh is heir to.' With respect to the affections and Poetry you must know by a sympathy my thoughts that way, and I daresay these few lines will be but a ratification: I wrote them on Mayday - and intend to finish the ode all in good time —

'Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia!' [See p. 119.]

You may perhaps be anxious to know for fact to what sentence in your Letter I allude. You say, 'I fear there is little chance of anything else in this life' — you seem by that to have been going through with a more painful and acute zest the same labyrinth that I have — I have come to the same conclusion thus far. My Branchings out therefrom have been numerous: one of them is the consideration

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of Wordsworth's genius and as a help, in the manner of gold being the meridian Line of worldly wealth, how he differs from Milton. And here I have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether Milton's apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing further or not than Wordsworth: And whether Wordsworth has in truth epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song. In regard to his genius alone we find what he says true as far as we have experienced, and we can judge no further but by larger experience axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses. We read fine things, but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author. - I know this is not plain; you will know exactly my meaning when I say that now I shall relish Hamlet more than I ever have done - Or, better you are sensible no man can set down Venery as a bestial or joyless thing until he is sick of it, and therefore all philosophising on it would be mere wording. Until we are sick, we understand not; in fine, as Byron says, 'Knowledge is sorrow'; and I go on to say that 'Sorrow is wisdom' - and further for aught we can know for certainty Wisdom is folly' So you see how I have run away from Wordsworth and Milton, and shall still run away from what was in my head, to observe, that some kind of letters are good squares, others handsome ovals, and other some orbicular, others spheroid -and why should not there be another species with two rough edges like a Rattrap? I hope you will find all my long letters of that species, and all will be well; for by merely touching the spring delicately and ethereally, the rough-edged will fly immediately into a proper compactness; and thus you may make a good wholesome loaf, with your own leaven in it, of my fragments If you cannot find this said Rat-trap sufficiently tractable, alas for me, t being an impossibility in grain for my ink

to stain otherwise: If I scribble long letters I must play my vagaries—I must be too heavy, or too light, for whole pages — I must be quaint and free of Tropes and figures I must play my draughts as I please, and for my advantage and your erudition, crown a white with a black, or a black with a white, and move into black or white, far and near as I please — I must go from Hazlitt to Patmore, and make Wordsworth and Coleman play at leap-frog, or keep one of them down a whole halfholiday at fly-the-garter-From Gray to Gay, from Little to Shakspeare.' Also as a long cause requires two or more sittings of the Court, so a long letter will require two or more sittings of the Breech, wherefore I shall resume after dinner

Have you not seen a Gull, an orc, a SeaMew, or anything to bring this Line to a proper length, and also fill up this clear part; that like the Gull I may dip* I hope, not out of sight- and also, like a Gull, I hope to be lucky in a good-sized fish This crossing a letter is not without its association- for chequer-work leads us naturally to a Milkmaid, a Milkmaid to Hogarth, Hogarth to Shakspeare — Shakspeare to Hazlitt - Hazlitt to Shakspeare -and thus by merely pulling an apronstring we set a pretty peal of Chimes at work-Let them chime on while, with your patience, I will return to Wordsworth - whether or no he has an extended vision or a circumscribed grandeur - whether he is an eagle in his nest or on the wingAnd to be more explicit and to show you how tall I stand by the giant, I will put down a simile of human life as far as I now perceive it; that is, to the point to which I say we both have arrived atWell I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest

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* The crossing of the letter, begun at the words 'Have you not,' here dips into the ori ginal writing.