“From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran,
  And lost in lassitude, lay all the man.”

Chapman supplied us with many an after-feast; but it was in the teeming wonderment of this, his first introduction, that, when I came down to breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter with no other inclosure than his famous sonnet, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer.”  We had parted, as I have already said, at day-spring; yet he contrived that I should receive the poem, from a distance of nearly two miles, before 10, A.M.  In the published copy of this sonnet he made an alteration in the seventh line:—­

  “Yet did I never breathe its pure serene.”

The original, which he sent me, had the phrase,

  “Yet could I never tell what men could mean”;

which he said was bald, and too simply wondering.  No one could more earnestly chastise his thoughts than Keats.  His favorite among Chapman’s Hymns of Homer was the one to Pan, and which he himself rivalled in the “Endymion.”

In one of our conversations about this period, I alluded to his position at St. Thomas’s Hospital,—­coasting and reconnoitring, as it were, that I might discover how he got on, and, with the total absorption that had evidently taken place of every other mood of his mind than that of imaginative composition, what was his bias for the future, and what his feeling with regard to the profession that had been chosen for him,—­a circumstance I did not know at that time.  He made no secret, however, that he could not sympathize with the science of anatomy, as a main pursuit in life; for one of the expressions that he used, in describing his unfitness for its mastery, was perfectly characteristic.  He said, in illustration of his argument,—­“The other day, for instance, during the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and Fairy-land.”  And yet, with all this self-styled unfitness for the pursuit, I was afterwards informed, that at his subsequent examination he displayed an amount of acquirement which surprised his fellow-students, who had scarcely any other association with him than that of a cheerful, crochety rhymester.

It was about this period, that, going to call upon Mr. Leigh Hunt, who then occupied a pretty little cottage in the “Vale of Health,” on Hampstead Heath, I took with me two or three of the poems I had received from Keats.  I did expect that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and indeed approvingly, of the compositions,—­written, too, by a youth under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty lines of the first poem.  Mr. Horace Smith happened to be there, on the occasion, and was not less demonstrative in his praise of their merits.  The piece which he read out, I remember, was the sonnet,—­