My dearly lovèd friend how oft have we In winter evenings (meaning to be free) To some well-chosen place used to retire, And there with moderate meat, and wine, and fire, Have past the hour contentedly with chat, Now talked of this and then discoursed of that, Spoke our own verses 'twixt ourselves, if not Other men's lines, which we by chance had got.
I have some lively thoughts that rove about, And loudly knock to have their passage out.
[8] It is to be remembered that in his famous volume of 1820 Keats prints first the poem he had last written, _Lamia_.
[9] So Wordsworth in his famous sonnet:--
This sea that bares its bosom to the moon.
[10] In Lord Houghton's and nearly all editions of Keats, including, I am sorry to say, my own, this phrase has been corrected, quite without cause, into the trite 'ugly cubs.'
'Poems' fall flat--Reviews by Hunt and others--Change of publishers--New friends: Bailey and Woodhouse--Begins _Endymion_ at Carisbrooke--Moves to Margate--Hazlitt and Southey--Hunt and Haydon--Ambition and self-doubt--Stays at Canterbury--Joins brothers at Hampstead--Dilke and Brown--Visits Bailey at Oxford--Work on _Endymion_--Bailey's testimony--Talk on Wordsworth--Letters from Oxford--To his sister Fanny--To Jane and J.H. Reynolds--Return to Hampstead--Friends at loggerheads--Stays at Burford Bridge--Correspondence--Confessions--Speculations--Imagination and truth--Composes various lyrics--'O love me truly'--'In drear-nighted December'--Dryden and Swinburne--_Endymion_ finished--An Autumnal close--Return to Hampstead.
Keats's first volume had been launched, to quote the words of Cowden Clarke, 'amid the cheers and fond anticipations of all his circle. Everyone of us expected (and not unreasonably) that it would create a sensation in the literary world.' The magniloquent Haydon words these expectations after his manner:--'I have read your _Sleep and Poetry_--it is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from their occupations and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that _will_ follow.' Sonnets poured in on the occasion, and not from intimates only. I have already quoted (p. 75) one which Reynolds, familiar with the contents of the forthcoming book, wrote a few days before its publication to welcome it and at the same time to congratulate Keats on his sonnet written in Clarke's copy of the _Floure and the Lefe_. Leigh Hunt, always delighted to repay compliment with compliment, replied effusively in kind to the sonnet in which Keats had dedicated the volume to him. Richard Woodhouse, of whom we shall soon hear more but who was as yet a stranger, in the closing lines of a sonnet addressed to Apollo, welcomed Keats as the last born son of that divinity and the herald of his return to lighten the poetic darkness of the land:--