His conversation was very engaging. He had a sweet toned voice, 'an excellent thing' in _man_ as well as 'in woman....' In his letters he talks of _suspecting_ everybody. It appeared not in his conversation. On the contrary, he was uniformly the apologist for poor, frail human nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man I ever knew, especially for the faults of his friends. But if any act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he rose into sudden and animated indignation. He had a truly poetic feeling for women; and he often spoke to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from him, with great delicacy and tenderness of affection. He had a soul of noble integrity: and his common sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed his character was in the best sense manly. Our conversation rarely or never flagged, during our walks, or boatings, or in the evening. And I have retained a few of his opinions on Literature and criticism which I will detail. The following passage from Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality was deeply felt by Keats, who however at this time seemed to me to value this great Poet rather in particular passages than in the full-length portrait, as it were, of the great imaginative and philosophic Christian Poet, which he really is, and which Keats obviously, not long afterwards, felt him to be. Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise; But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized, _High instincts, before which our mortal nature_ Did tremble like a guilty thing surprized. The last lines he thought were quite awful in their application to a guilty finite creature, like man, in the appalling nature of the feeling which they suggested to a thoughtful mind. Again, we often talked of that noble passage in the lines on _Tintern Abbey_:-- That blessed mood, In which _the burthen of the mystery_, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened. And his references to this passage are frequent in his letters.--But in those exquisite stanzas, She dwelt among the untrodden ways, Beside the springs of Dove, ending,-- She lived unknown and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and oh, _The difference to me_. The simplicity of the last line he declared to be the most perfect pathos. Among the qualities of high poetic promise in Keats was, even at this time, his correct taste. I remember to have been struck with this by his remarks on that well known and often quoted passage of the _Excursion_ upon the Greek Mythology--where it is said that