brothers, who were at this time employed in the counting-house of Mr. Abbey; a service which they soon afterwards left. But he spent a great part of his time in Hunt's cottage in the Vale of Health at Hampstead, where a bed was always ready for him in the library. This is the
Of pleasure's temple,
celebrated in the verses entitled 'Sleep and Poetry' (published in the collection of 1817). Both this piece and that beginning 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill' (intended as the exordium of a projected poem on the myth of Endymion) were conceived, and the former completed, at Hampstead during this summer. The fragment on Calidore, with its Induction, belongs to the same period. The sonnet 'As late I rambled in the happy fields' records an intimacy with a lad much younger than himself, Charles Wells [q. v.], afterwards author of 'Joseph and his Brethren.' This was presently broken off in consequence of a hoax which Wells played on the invalid Tom Keats (who had been his schoolfellow), and which the poet fiercely resented on his brother's behalf. During part of August and September Keats was away at Margate, where he wrote the rhymed epistles to his brother George and to Charles Cowden Clarke, with the sonnet to the former beginning 'Many the wonders I this day have seen.' The sonnet 'To my Brother,' and that beginning 'Keen fitful gusts are whispering here and there,' record his return in the autumn to the city lodging and the society of Hunt at Hampstead. From about this date commences the series of Keats's familiar letters to his friends and relations, which furnish so full and on the whole so attractive a record of his character and doings until a few months before his death. Their unique interest lies in the complete openness and sincerity with which they reflect every phase of his manifold moods and speculations, all his flaws of training with all his gifts of genius. They are written in a prose style of great facility and resource, but with no attempt at studied composition, and abound in passages of admirable beauty and insight, side by side with others of headlong nonsense and high spirits, and some that justify the taunts of those who called him 'cockney.'
Some time in November Leigh Hunt introduced Keats to the painter Haydon, to whom he presently addressed the sonnet 'Great Spirits now on earth are sojourning.' Haydon conceived an ardent admiration and affection for the young poet, which was not less ardently returned. His influence on Keats now became as great as that of Hunt, and partly antagonistic to it. The two men were on familiar but not cordial terms. Haydon's flaming egotism and ambition were accompanied by sentiments of orthodox piety, which made him look askance at the airy scepticism of Hunt, and he was constantly warning Keats against the other's vanity and light-mindedness. On 1 Dec. 1816 Hunt published in the 'Examiner' Keats's sonnet on Chapman's Homer, accompanied by an article on the poetical promise of the author, whose name he coupled with those of Shelley and J. H. Reynolds. Four others of his sonnets followed in the same periodical, 16 and 23 Feb. and 9 and 16 March 1817. From about the beginning of this winter (1816-17) his poetical vocation seems to have been sealed. He determined, not without remonstrance from Mr. Abbey, to abandon the profession of surgery, for which, in spite of some operations successfully performed, he declared that he felt himself unfitted, and to bring out a volume of his verses. Shelley, having first advised him to keep them back for the present, afterwards helped him to find a publisher. The brothers Ollier undertook this office, and the book appeared under the title 'Poems by John Keats,' with a dedication to Leigh Hunt, early in March 1817. It is full of immaturities, but also of buoyancy and promise; striking the note of rebellion against the poetical methods and conventions of the eighteenth century more vigorously than it had been struck since the publication of the 'Lyrical Ballads' twenty years before, and with this difference, that Keats, with all his crudities, shows himself instinctively more of an Elizabethan than either Coleridge or Wordsworth. His experiments in metre and diction, sometimes happy, sometimes the reverse, recall constantly the examples of Chapman (especially in the translations of Homer's hymns), of Fletcher, and of William Browne; and he is essentially akin to the poets of that age by the richness and freshness of his imaginative delight in classic fable, in romance, and in the beauties of nature. Among recent writers he shows himself most influenced by Leigh Hunt. One of Hunt's foibles was a trick of jaunty colloquialism in verse, which he mistook tor poetic ease, and this Keats unluckily caught from him for a time along with better things. On the appearance of Keats's volume Hunt proved nevertheless the most judicious as well as friendly of its critics (Examiner, 1 June and 6 and 13 July 1817). But readers in general remained quite indifferent: the book had no sale: and the publishers and author (or rather, it would seem, his brothers for him) were for the time mutually disgusted.
