“The poetry of earth is never dead”;

“Such a prosperous opening!” he said; and when he came to the tenth and eleventh lines,—­

  “On a lone winter evening, when the frost
  Has wrought a silence”;

“Ah! that’s perfect! bravo, Keats!”—­and then he went on in a dilation upon, the dumbness of all Nature during the season’s suspension and torpidity.  With all the kind and gratifying things that were said to him, Keats protested to me, as we were afterwards walking home, that he preferred Hunt’s treatment of the subject to his own.

He had left the neighborhood of the Borough, and was now living with his brothers in apartments on the second floor of a house in the Poultry, over the passage leading to the Queen’s Head Tavern, and opposite one of the City Companies’ Halls,—­the Ironmongers’, if I mistake not.  I have the associating reminiscence of many happy hours spent in this lodging.  Here was determined upon, in great part written, and sent forth to the world, the first little, but vigorous, offspring of his brain:—­

  POEMS
  BY
  JOHN KEATS.

  “What more felicity can fell to creature
  Than to enjoy delight with liberty?”

  Fate of the Butterfly,—­SPENSER

LONDON:  PRINTED FOR C. AND J. OLLIER, 3, WELBECK STREET, CAVENDISH SQUARE. 1817.

Here, on the evening that the last proof-sheet was brought from the printer, and, as his biographer has recorded, upon being informed, if he purposed having a Dedication to the book, that it must be sent forthwith, he went to a side-table, and, in the midst of mixed conversation (for there were several friends in the room,) he brought to Charles Ollier, the publisher, the Dedication-Sonnet to Leigh Hunt.  If the original manuscript of that poem—­a legitimate sonnet, with every restriction of rhyme and metre—­could now be produced, and the time—­recorded in which it was written, it would be pronounced an extraordinary performance; added to which, the non-alteration of a single word in the poem (a circumstance noted at the time) claims for it, I should suppose, a merit without a parallel.

“The poem which commences the volume,” says Mr. Monckton Milnes, “was suggested to Keats by a delightful summer’s day, as he stood beside the gate that loads from the battery on Hampstead Heath into a field by Caen Wood”; and the lovely passage beginning,

  “Linger awhile upon some bending planks,”

and which contains the description of the “swarms of minnows that show their little heads,” Keats told me was the recollection of our having frequently loitered over the rail of a foot-bridge that spanned a little brook in the last field upon entering Edmonton.  He himself thought the picture was correct, and liked it; and I do not know who could improve it.