He proposes that you should come out and go shares with him and me, in a periodical work, to be conducted here; in which each of the contracting parties should publish all their original compositions and share the profits.  He proposed it to Moore, but for some reason it was never brought to bear.  There can be no doubt that the profits of any scheme in which you and Lord Byron engage, must, from various, yet co-operating reasons, be very great.  As for myself, I am for the present only a sort of link between you and him, until you can know each other, and effectuate the arrangement; since (to entrust you with a secret which, for your sake, I withhold from Lord Byron) nothing would induce me to share in the profits, and still less, in the borrowed splendour of such a partnership.  You and he, in different manners, would be equal, and would bring, in a different manner, but in the same proportion, equal stocks of reputation and success.  Do not let my frankness with you, nor my belief that you deserve it more than Lord Byron, have the effect of deterring you from assuming a station in modern literature which the universal voice of my contemporaries forbids me either to stoop or to aspire to.  I am, and I desire to be, nothing.

I did not ask Lord Byron to assist me in sending a remittance for your journey; because there are men, however excellent, from whom we would never receive an obligation, in the worldly sense of the word; and I am as jealous for my friend as for myself.  But I suppose that I shall at last make up an impudent face, and ask Horace Smith to add to the many obligations he has conferred on me.  I know I need only ask.

I think I have never told you how very much I like your Amyntas; it almost reconciles me to translations.  In another sense I still demur.  You might have written another such a poem as the Nymphs, with no access of efforts.  I am full of thoughts and plans, and should do something, if the feeble and irritable frame which incloses it was willing to obey the spirit.  I fancy that then I should do great things.  Before this you will have seen Adonais.  Lord Byron, I suppose from modesty, on account of his being mentioned in it, did not say a word of Adonais, though he was loud in his praise of Prometheus, and, what you will not agree with him in, censure of the Cenci.  Certainly, if Marino Faliero is a drama, the Cenci is not—­but that between ourselves.  Lord Byron is reformed, as far as gallantry goes, and lives with a beautiful and sentimental Italian lady, who is as much attached to him as may be.  I trust greatly to his intercourse with you, for his creed to become as pure as he thinks his conduct is.  He has many generous and exalted qualities, but the canker of aristocracy wants to be cut out.

JOHN KEATS

1795-1821

To JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS