The lovers' quarrel is over for the nonce. Visitors begin to drop in for the evening; there is music and singing in Brown's little drawing room. Keats is very fond of music, and can himself, though possessing hardly any voice, "produce a pleasing musical effect." He will sit and listen for hours to a sympathetic performer: but his ear, like all his faculties, is abnormally sensitive: and a wrong note will drive him into a frenzy. As the room grows fuller, he becomes restive. "The poetical character," he has observed, "is not itself--it has no character. When I am in a room with people, the identity of everyone in the room begins to press upon me so that I am in a little time annihilated."
In the light chit-chat of small talk and badinage he has no part: it bewilders and annoys him. Those about him--especially the women--seem to show up in their worst colours. Fanny herself appears, as he has described her at their first meeting, an absolute _minx_. And presently he contrives to slip stealthily away, and seats himself in some quiet chamber, alone with the darkness and the May-scents of leaf and blossom. "I hope I shall never marry," he groans once more; "the roaring wind is my wife, and the stars through the window-panes are my children: the mighty abstract idea of Beauty I have in all things, stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone, than shapes of epic greatness are stationed round me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's Bodyguard."
The young man now lights his candles, and takes up a familiar and favourite occupation;--the writing of a long letter to his brother George in America. This epistle is, as one might expect, almost entirely concerned with the art of poetry--what else has Keats to write about?--whether from the side of technique, or inspiration. He dwells on the adroit management of open and close vowels--he shows how "the poetry of earth is never dead;" he discusses the need of constant application to work, and how "the genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man." And meanwhile, as fitful strains of song reach him from the distance, and his roving gaze rivets itself upon a Wedgwood copy of a Grecian vase--one of Brown's chief treasures--the fleeting wafts of sound, and the lovely symmetry of shape, and the golden chain of figures, blend themselves into one harmonious whole of word-music.