to his comrade, “Come, be a sharer of my dreams as of my fishing,” and then tells his pretty vision.  With no lack of sympathy, I say, because the lavish generosity with which Keats bestowed his money upon his friends, when he had but a small store left and when financial difficulties were staring him in the face, is one of the finest things about him.  There is a correspondence with that strange, selfish spendthrift Haydon, which shows the endless trouble Keats would take to raise money for a friend when he was in worse straits himself.  Haydon treated him with insolent frankness, and hinted that Keats was parsimonious and ungenerous; even so, Keats never lost his temper, but described with perfect simplicity the extraordinary difficulties he was himself involved in, with as much patience and good-humour as though he had been himself the borrower; and the delicious letters that he wrote, all through his own anxieties, to his little sister Fanny, then a girl at a boarding-school, reveal, like nothing else, the faithful and-tender spirit of the boy—­for he was hardly more than a boy.  Of course there are letters, like those of Lamb and FitzGerald, which bring one very close to the spirit of the writer; but with this difference, that they rarely seem to lay bare their inmost thought; but Keats had no reserve with his best friends.  He put into words the very things that we most of us are ashamed, from a fear of being accused of pose and affectation, to reveal—­his loftiest hopes and aspirations, the wide remote prospects seen from the hills of life, the deep ambitions, the exaltations of spirit, the raptures of art.  I do not mean that one can share these in their fulness; but Keats seems to have experienced daily and hourly, in his best days, those august shocks of experience and insight of which any man who loves and worships art, however fitfully, can register a few.  There is a little picture of Keats, done, I think, after his death by Severn, which represents him sitting in the tiny parlour of Wentworth Place, with the window open to the orchard, where, under the plum-tree, he wrote the Ode to the Nightingale.  He sits on one chair, with his arm on the back of another, his hand upon his hair, reading a volume of Shakespeare with a smile of satisfaction.  He is neatly dressed, and has pumps with bows on his feet.  That picture, like the letters, seems to bring Keats curiously near to life; I always fancy-that Severn must have had in his mind a charming passage in one of Keats’ letters to his sister Fanny, where he says he would like to have a house with a big bow-window with some stained glass in it, looking out on the Lake of Geneva, with a bowl of gold-fish by his side, where he would sit and read all day, like a portrait of a gentleman reading.  The picture is somehow so characteristic that one feels for a moment in his presence.

Well, what do I deduce from all this?  Partly that Keats was a man of incomparable genius; partly that he was a man whom one could have loved for himself; partly, too, that one ought not to be ashamed of one’s far-reaching thoughts, if one is fortunate enough to have them, and that one receives and gives more good by telling them frankly and unsuspiciously than if one keeps them to oneself for fear of being thought a fool.