Moreover, the first of his youthful sonnets is addressed to Chatterton. The "Epistle to George," August 1816, opens with a reference to "many a dreary hour" which John Keats has passed, fearing he would never be able to write good poetry, however much he might gaze on sky, honey-bees, and the beauty of woman. The "Epistle to Clarke," September 1816, pays ample tribute to the guidance which he had afforded to Keats into the realms of poetry, and contains a couplet which has of late been very often quoted-- "Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly Up to its climax, and then dying proudly?" The sonnet-- "O Solitude, if I must with thee dwell," is the first thing that Keats ever published. It had previously appeared in _The Examiner_ for May 5, 1816, and is clearly one of the best of these early sonnets. The sonnet which begins with the unmetrical line-- "How many bards gild the lapses of time" was included in the very first batch of verses by Keats which Cowden Clarke showed to Leigh Hunt. Hunt expressed "unhesitating and prompt admiration" of some other one among the compositions; and Horace Smith, who was present, reading out the sonnet now before us, praised as "a well-condensed expression" the contorted and inefficient line-- "That distance of recognizance bereaves," _i.e._ [sounds] which distance bereaves of recognizance, or, in plain English, which are too distant to be recognized. Two other sonnets are addressed to Haydon in a tone of glowing laudation. "Sleep and Poetry" is (if we except the sonnet upon Chapman's Homer) by far the most important poem in the volume. It was written partly in Leigh Hunt's cottage at Hampstead, in the library-room, where a sofa-bed had on one occasion been made up for Keats's convenience, and the latter lines in the poem refer to objects of art which were kept in the room. Apart from the impressive line which all readers remember, saying of poetry-- "'Tis might half-slumbering on its own right arm," there are several passages interesting as showing Keats's enthusiasm for the art in which he was now a beginner, soon to be an adept-- "Oh for ten years that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy!" also "The great end Of poesy, that it should be a friend To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man;" and again "They shall be accounted poet-kings Who simply tell the most heart-easing things"-- both of these being definitions in which we might imagine Leigh Hunt to have borne his part, or at least notified his concurrence. The following well-known diatribe is also important, and should be kept in mind when we come to speak of the reception accorded to Keats by established critics, more or less of the old school. He has been dilating on the splendours of British poetry of the great era, say Spenser to Milton, and then proceeds--