[Footnote 1:  Keats died in February.]

To PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Outpourings of gratitude

Stonehouse, near Plymouth, 26 March, 1822.

MY DEAREST FRIEND,

Your letters always contain something delightful to me, whatever news they bring.

  Surgit amici aliquid, quod in ipsis nubibus
  ardet.

But I confess your latter ones have greatly relieved me on the subject you speak of.  They only make me long, with an extreme Homeric longing, to be at Pisa,—­I mean such an one as Achilles felt when he longed to be with his father,—­sharp in his very limbs.  We have secured a ship, the David Walter, which will call for us here, and sets sail from London in a fortnight.  I have written by to-day’s post with intelligence of it to Mrs. Fletcher, enclosing her the letter, and giving her the option of going on board in London, or here.  I need not say we shall attend to her comforts in every respect.  The same post also carries a letter to Mr. Gisborne, stating your wishes, and wonders respecting Adonais.  If it is not published before I leave England, I will publish my criticism upon the Pisa copy,—­a criticism which I think you will like.  I take the opportunity of showing the public why Gifford’s review spoke so bitterly of Prometheus, and why it pretends that the most metaphysical passage of your most metaphysical poem is a specimen of the clearness of your general style.  The wretched priest-like cunning and undertoned malignity of that review of Prometheus is indeed a homage paid to qualities which can so provoke it.  The Quarterly pretends now, that it never meddles with you personally,—­of course it never did!  For this, Blackwood cries out upon it, contrasting its behaviour in those delicate matters with its own!  This is better and better, and the public seem to think so; for these things, depend upon it, are getting better understood every day, and shall be better and better understood every day to come.  One circumstance which helps to reconcile me to having been detained on this coast, is the opportunity it has given me to make your works speak for themselves wherever I could; and you are in high lustre, I assure you, with the most intelligent circles in Plymouth, [Greek:  astaer epsos].  I have, indeed, been astonished to find how well prepared people of intelligence are to fall in with your aspirations, and despise the mistakes and rascally instincts of your calumniators.  This place, for instance, abounds in schoolmasters, who appear, to a man, to be liberal to an extreme and esoterical degree.  And such, there is reason to believe, is the case over the greater part of the kingdom, greatly, no doubt, owing to political causes.  Think of the consequences of this with the rising generation.  I delight in Adonais.  It is the most Delphic