Another example of his promptly suggestive imagination, and uncommon facility in giving it utterance, occurred one day upon his returning home and finding me asleep upon the sofa, with my volume of Chaucer open at the “Flower and the Leaf.”  After expressing his admiration of the poem, which he had been reading, he gave me the fine testimony of that opinion, in pointing to the sonnet he had written at the close of it, which was an extempore effusion, and it has not the alteration of a single word.  It lies before me now, signed, “J.K., Feb., 1817.”

If my memory does not betray me, this charming out-door fancy-scene was Keats’s first introduction to Chaucer.  Certain I am that the “Troilus and Cresseide” was an after-acquaintance; and clearly do I remember his approbation of the favorite passages that I had marked.  I desired him to retrace the poem, and with his pen confirm and denote those which were congenial with his own feeling and judgment.  These two circumstances, connected with the literary career of this cherished object of his friend’s esteem and love, have stamped a priceless value upon that friend’s miniature 18mo copy of Chaucer.

The little first volume of Keats’s Muse was launched amid the cheers and fond anticipations of all his circle.  Every one of us expected that it would create a sensation in the literary world; and we calculated upon, at least, a succession of reprints.  Alas! it might have emerged in Timbuctoo with stronger chance of fame and favor.  It never passed to a second edition; the first was but a small one, and that was never sold off.  The whole community, as if by compact, determined to know nothing about it.  The word had been passed that its author was a Radical; and in those blessed days of “Bible-Crown-and-Constitution” supremacy, he might with better chance of success have been a robber,—­there were many prosperous public ones,—­if he had also been an Anti-Jacobin.  Keats had made no demonstration of political opinion; but he had dedicated his book to Leigh Hunt, a Radical news-writer, and a dubbed partisan of the French ruler, because he did not call him the “Corsican monster,” and other disgusting names.  Verily, “the former times were not better than these.”  Men can now write the word “Liberty” without being chalked on the back and hounded out.

Poor Keats! he little anticipated, and as little deserved, the cowardly and scoundrel treatment that was in store for him upon the publication of his second composition, the “Endymion.”  It was in the interval of the two productions that he had moved from the Poultry, and had taken a lodging in Well Walk, Hampstead,—­in the first or second house, on the right hand, going up to the Heath.  I have an impression that he had been some weeks absent at the sea-side before settling in this domicile; for the “Endymion” had been begun, and he had made considerable advances in his plan.  He came to me one Sunday, and I walked with him, spending the whole day in Well Walk.