“But I am mortal:  and I cannot write
      Aught that may foil the fatal wing of Time. 
      Silent, I look at Fame:  I cannot climb
   To where her Temple is—­Not mine the might:—­
      I have some glimmering of what is sublime—­
   But, ah! it is a most inconstant light.”

Keats might have written this sonnet in a melancholy mood.

“About this time he (Peter) wrote a slang description of a fight he had witnessed to a lady.”  Unlucky Peter!  “Was ever woman in this manner wooed?” The lady “glanced her eye over page after page in hopes of meeting with something that was intelligible,” and no wonder she did not care for a long letter “devoted to the subject of a mill between Belasco and the Brummagem youth.”  Peter was so ill-advised as to appear before her with glorious scars, “two black eyes” in fact, and she “was inexorably cruel.”  Peter did not survive her disdain.  “The lady still lives, and is married”!  It is ever thus!

Peter’s published works contain an American tragedy.  Peter says he got it from a friend, who was sending him an American copy of “Guy Mannering” “to present to a young lady who, strange to say, read books and wore pockets,” virtues unusual in the sex.  One of the songs (on the delights of bull-baiting) contains the most vigorous lines I have ever met, but they are too vigorous for our lax age.  The tragedy ends most tragically, and the moral comes in “better late,” says the author, “than never.”  The other poems are all very lively, and very much out of date.  Poor Peter!

Reynolds was married by 1818, and it is impossible to guess whether the poems of Peter Corcoran did or did not contain allusions to his own more lucky love affair.  “Upon my soul,” writes Keats, “I have been getting more and more close to you every day, ever since I knew you, and now one of the first pleasures I look to is your happy marriage.”  Reynolds was urging Keats to publish the “Pot of Basil” “as an answer to the attack made on me in Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review.”

Next Keats writes that he himself “never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has haunted me these two days.”  On September 22, 1819, Keats sent Reynolds the “Ode to Autumn,” than which there is no more perfect poem in the language of Shakespeare.  This was the last of his published letters to Reynolds.  He was dying, haunted eternally by that woman’s shape and voice.

Reynolds’s best-known book, if any of them can be said to be known at all, was published under the name of John Hamilton.  It is “The Garden of Florence, and Other Poems” (Warren, London, 1821).  There is a dedication—­to his young wife.

“Thou hast entreated me to ‘write no more,’” and he, as an elderly “man of twenty-four,” promises to obey.  “The lily and myself henceforth are two,” he says, implying that he and the lily have previously been “one,” a quaint confession from the poet of Peter Corcoran.  There is something very pleasant in the graceful regret and obedience of this farewell to the Muse.  He says to Mrs. Reynolds: