It was a treat to see as well as hear him read a pathetic passage.  Once, when reading the “Cymbeline” aloud’, I saw his eyes fill with tears, and for some moments he was unable to proceed, when he came to the departure of Posthumus, and Imogen’s saying she would have watched him

“till the diminution Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle; Nay, followed him till he had melted from The smallness of a gnat to air; and then Have turned mine eye and wept.”

I cannot quite reconcile the time of our separating at this stage of his career,—­which of us first went to London; but it was upon an occasion when I was walking thither, and, I think, to see Leigh Hunt, who had just fulfilled his penalty of confinement in Horsemonger-Lane Prison for the trivial libel upon the Prince Regent, that Keats, who was coming over to Enfield, met me, and, turning, accompanied me back part of the way to Edmonton.  At the last field-gate, when taking leave, he gave me the sonnet entitled, “Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison.”  Unless I am utterly mistaken, this was the first proof I had received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly can I recall the conscious look with which he hesitatingly offered it!  There are some momentary glances of beloved friends that fade only with life.  I am not in a position to contradict the statement of his biographer, that “the lines in imitation of Spenser,

  “’Now Morning from her orient charger came,
  And her first footsteps touched a verdant hill,’ etc.,

“are the earliest known verses of his composition”; from the subject being the inspiration of his first love—­and such a love!—­in poetry, it is most probable; but certainly his first published poem was the sonnet commencing,

  ‘O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell’;

and that will be found in the “Examiner,” some time, as I conjecture, in 1816,—­for I have not the paper to refer to, and, indeed, at this distance, both of time and removal from the means of verification, I would not be dogmatical.

When we both had come to London,—­he to enter as a student of St. Thomas’s Hospital,—­he was not long in discovering that my abode was with my brother-in-law, in Little Warner Street, Clerkenwell; and just at that time I was installed housekeeper, and was solitary.  He, therefore, would come and revive his loved gossip, till, as the author of the “Urn Burial” says, “we were acting our antipodes,—­the huntsmen were up in America, and they already were past their first sleep in Persia.”  At this time he lived in his first lodging upon coming to London, near to St. Thomas’s Hospital.  I find his address in a letter which must have preceded my appointing him to come and lighten my darkness in Clerkenwell.  At the close of the letter, he says,—­“Although the Borough is a beastly place in dirt, turnings, and windings, yet No. 8, Dean Street, is not difficult to find;