Of Keats's friends in general it may be said that the one whom he respected very highly in point of character was Bailey: the one who had a degree of genius fully worthy, whatever its limitations and defects, of communing with his own, was Haydon. Shelley can hardly be reckoned among his friends, though very willing and even earnest to be such, both in life and after death. Keats held visibly aloof from Shelley, more perhaps on the ground of his being a man of some family and position than from any other motive. Shortly after the publication of "The Revolt of Islam," Keats's rather naïve expression was, "Poor Shelley, I think he has his quota of good qualities." Neither did he show any warm or frank admiration of Shelley's poetry. On receiving a copy of "The Cenci," he urged its author to "curb his magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of his subject with ore." We should not ascribe this to any mean-spirited jealousy, but to that sense, which grew to a great degree of intensity in Keats, that the art of composition and execution is of paramount importance in poetry, and must supersede all considerations of abstract or proselytizing intention.
I must next proceed to offer some account of Keats's person, character, and turn of mind.
As I have already said, Keats was a very small man, barely more than five feet in height. He was called "Little Keats" by his surgical fellow-students. Archdeacon Bailey has left a good description of him in brief:--
"There was in the character of his countenance the femineity which Coleridge thought to be the mental constitution of true genius. His hair was beautiful, and, if you placed your hand upon his head, the curls fell round it like a rich plumage. I do not particularly remember the thickness of the upper lip so generally described; but the mouth was too wide, and out of harmony with the rest of his face, which had a peculiar sweetness of expression, with a character of mature thought, and an almost painful sense of suffering."
"His lower limbs were small in comparison with the upper, but neat and well-turned. His shoulders were very broad for his size. He had a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up--an eager power checked and made impatient by ill-health. Every feature was at once strongly cut and delicately alive. If there was any faulty expression, it was in the mouth, which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. His face was rather long than otherwise. The upper lip projected a little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing--large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled. In this there was ill-health as well as imagination, for he did not like these betrayals of emotion; and he had great personal as well as moral courage. His hair, of a brown colour, was fine, and hung in natural ringlets. The head was a puzzle for the phrenologists, being remarkably small in the skull; a singularity which he had in common with Byron and Shelley, whose hats I could not get on. Keats was sensible of the disproportion above noticed between his upper and lower extremities; and he would look at his hand, which was faded, and swollen in the veins, and say it was the hand of a man of fifty."