While Tom was still lingering out the days of his brief life, Keats made the acquaintance of two young ladies. He has left us a description of both of them. His portraiture of the first, Miss Jane Cox, is written in a tone which might seem the preliminary to a _grande passion_; but this did not prove so; she rapidly passed out of his existence and out of his memory. His portraiture of the second, Miss Fanny Brawne, does not suggest anything beyond a tepid liking which might perhaps merge into a definite antipathy; this also was delusive, for he was from the first smitten with Miss Brawne, and soon profoundly in love with her--I might say desperately in love, for indeed desperation, which became despair, was the main ingredient in his passion, in all but its earliest stages. I shall here extract these two passages, for both of them are of exceptional importance for our biography--one as acquainting us with Keats's general range of feeling in relation to women, and the other as introducing the most serious and absorbing sentiment of the last two years of his life. On October 29, 1818, he wrote as follows to his brother George and his wife in America:-- "The Misses Reynolds are very kind to me.... On my return, the first day I called [this was probably towards the 20th of September], they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a cousin of theirs, Miss Cox, who, having fallen out with her grandpapa in a serious manner, was invited by Mrs. Reynolds to take asylum in her house. She is an East Indian, and ought to be her grandfather's heir.... From what I hear she is not without faults of a real kind; but she has others which are more apt to make women of inferior claims hate her. She is not a Cleopatra, but is at least a Charmian; she has a rich Eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. When she comes into the room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her; from habit she thinks that nothing particular. I always find myself more at ease with such a woman; the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble; I forget myself entirely, because I live in her. You will by this time think I am in love with her; so, before I go any further, I will tell you I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very yes and no of whose lips[4] is to me a banquet. I don't cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like her, and her like, because one has no _sensations_; what we both are is taken for granted.