My brain is full of wilding darknesses, snarled and knotted gifts and penchants: but into _his_ strong brain the strong fresh yellow rain-washed sun shines straight down--through the wide twin-brightness of his Eyes. I look down his Eyes--twin public wells (he belongs publicly and privately to all this mixed mad world, and anyone may look!--)--I look into that titanic vibrant brain, and mine catches some of it: a blest and precious Disease, oh, a rare Disease! My Heart--my Heart feels strange and tired and dead, a bit of dead-sea fruit: but _his_ heart, warm and real and boundlessly unsatisfied, is always the deep quick fragrant Rose of this World. A Hero!--a Poet-at-arms!--John Keats! ‘He has outsoared the shadow of our night,’ wrote that Shelley, and wrote no truer word. I have read so many of the strange and splendid things--bits of them: Vergil and Homer and Villon and Goethe and all the English poets, and prose writers like Carlyle who in places out-poet poets,--and moderner ones and the new poets, imagists and others: John Keats feels a noticeably braver thing, and always, always a little way beyond. He is purely lyric. When he loved a woman he loved the dubious fascinating Fanny Brawn-- sordid-brained, worldly: to him a mixed living devilish-glowing goddess. A higher-souled woman would neither have so tortured nor so held him. He was purely lyric. He cared truly nothing for the verdicts of critics and reviewers: and in the sweet-lipped boyish beauty of his youth they truly and easily killed him. It would be like that--it had to be. He was so purely lyric. He died in the sweet fierce dazzling cause of Beauty. I have so many thoughts and my thoughts are always my own. There are endless written thoughts deeper than mine--finer, stronger, anything-you-like. But mine answer for me: no written thoughts affect them, though they thrill my reading hours. Only John Keats’s thoughts can enter in and crush and cripple mine. Because everybody is a little bit like John Keats I have a starry thin edge of faith inside me. He is food for my hunger of thought, fire for my passion of life.--John Keats! He is the resurrection and the life.-- From my desk he gazes at me in a frame of old-gold. Every day the sunset on the glass blurs his large mournful joyous eyes with strangest agonized sunset tears: he shows me the sweet, sweet intoxication of his lyric grief. He died young, unfinished--and oh, but it’s a shivering ecstasy to think of all those lyrics in him he never wrote!--the sweeter melodies--‘Unheard.’ _The edge of mist-and-silver_ To-morrow Hidden somewhere in the invisible unused air-plateaus is a little Child: mine: who has never been born. A tenet in me is that a woman by every right and by old earthen law should, if she will, have her child--should be the warm-winged mother.