We have already seen that Keats in early childhood was vehement and ungovernable. His sensibility displayed itself in the strongest contrasts, and he would be convulsed with laughter or with tears, rapidly interchanged. At school his skill in bodily exercises, and his marked generosity of spirit, made him very popular--his comrades surmising that he would turn out superior in some active career, such as soldiering. To be rated as a good boy was not his ambition; but, as previously stated, he settled down into a very attentive scholar. Later on, his friend Bailey liked "the simplicity of his character," and his winning affectionate manner. "Simplicity" means, I suppose, frankness or straightforwardness; for I cannot see that Keats's character was at any time particularly simple--I should rather say that it was complex and many-sided. The one great craving of Keats, before the love for Miss Brawne engrossed him, was the desire to become an excellent poet; to do great things in poesy, and leave a name among the immortals. At times he was conscious of some presumption in this craving; but mostly it seems to have held such plenary possession of him that the question of presumption or otherwise hardly arose. Whether he felt very strongly upon any matters of intellectual or general concern other than poetic ones may admit of some doubt. In Book II. of "Endymion" he openly proclaims that poetic love-making is the one thing needful to the susceptible mind; the Athenian admiral and his auspicious owl, the Indian expeditions of Alexander, Ulysses and the Cyclops, the death-day of empires, are as nothing to Juliet's passion, Hero's tears, Imogen's swoon, and Pastorella in the bandits' den. He does indeed, in one of his letters (April 1818), aver "I would jump down AEtna for any great public good"; but it may perhaps be permissible to think that he would at all events have postponed the Empedoclean feat until he had written and ensured the publishing of some poem upon which he could be content to stake his claim to permanent poetic renown. His tension of thought was great. In a letter which he addressed in May 1817 to Leigh Hunt there is a little passage which may be worth quoting here, along with Mr. Dilke's comment upon it: "I went to the Isle of Wight. Thought so much about poetry so long together that I could not get to sleep at night; and moreover, I know not how it was, I could not get wholesome food. By this means, in a week or so, I became not over-capable in my upper stories, and set off pell-mell for Margate, at least a hundred and fifty miles, because forsooth I fancied that I should like my old lodging here, and could continue to do without trees. Another thing, I was too much in solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only resource."