Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-FameColvin, Sidney
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Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame
Colvin, Sidney
Keats, John, 1795-1821; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
Now Fanny you must write soon--and write all you think about, never
mind what--only let me have a good deal of your writing--You need not
do it all at once--be two or three or four days about it, and let it
be a diary of your Life. You will preserve all my Letters and I will
secure yours--and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have
a good Bundle--which, hereafter, when things may have strangely
altered and God knows what happened, we may read over together and
look with pleasure on times past--that now are to come.
Next follows another letter to Jane Reynolds; partly making fun, much
better fun than in the last, about Dilke's shooting and about the rare
havoc he would like to make in Mrs Dilke's garden were he at Hampstead:
partly grave in the high style into which he is apt at any moment to
change from nonsense:--
Now let us turn to the sea-shore. Believe me, my dear Jane, it is a
great happiness to see that you are, in this finest part of the year,
winning a little enjoyment from the hard world. In truth, the great
Elements we know of, are no means comforters: the open sky sits upon
our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of state--the
Earth is our throne and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before
it--able, like David's harp, to make such a one as you forget almost
the tempest cares of life. I have found in the ocean's music,--varying
(tho' self-same) more than the passion of Timotheus, an enjoyment not
to be put into words; and, 'though inland far I be,' I now hear the
voice most audibly while pleasing myself in the idea of your
sensations.
To Reynolds Keats writes on September the 21st:--
For these last five or six days, we have had regularly a Boat on the
Isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number
than your eye-lashes. We sometimes skim into a Bed of rushes, and
there become naturalized river-folks,--there is one particularly nice
nest, which we have christened 'Reynolds's Cove,' in which we have
read Wordsworth, and talked as may be; I think I see you and Hunt
meeting in the Pit.--What a very pleasant fellow he is, if he would
give up the sovereignty of a room pro bono. What evenings we might
pass with him, could we have him from Mrs H. Failings I am always
rather rejoiced to find in a man than sorry for; they bring us to a
level.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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