With Hunt also, in spite of the momentary causes of annoyance we have seen, Keats's intercourse continued frequent, while with Reynolds his intimacy grew daily closer. At Hunt's he again saw something of Shelley. 'The Wednesday before last Shelley, Hunt, and I, wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile,' he tells his brothers on the 16th of February, 1818. The sonnets are preserved. They were to be written, it was agreed, in a quarter of an hour. Shelley and Keats were up to time, but Hunt had to sit up half the night to finish his. It was worth the pains, and with it for once the small poet outdid the two great. 'I have been writing,' continues Keats, 'at intervals, many songs and sonnets, and I long to be at Teignmouth to read them over to you.' With the help of his manuscripts or of the transcripts made from them by his friends, it is possible to retrace the actual order of many of these fugitive pieces. On the 16th of January was written the sonnet on Mrs Reynolds's cat, perhaps Keats's best thing in the humorous vein; on the 21st, after seeing in Leigh Hunt's possession a lock of hair reputed to be Milton's, the address to that poet beginning 'Chief of organic numbers!' which he sends to the prime Milton enthusiast among his friends, Benjamin Bailey, with the comment, 'This I did at Hunt's, at his request,--perhaps I should have done something better alone and at home.' The first two lines,-- Chief of organic numbers, Old scholar of the spheres! read like an anticipation in the rough of the first stanza of Tennyson's masterly set of alcaics already referred to, beginning 'O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies.' To the 22nd belongs the sonnet, 'O golden tongued Romance with serene lute,' in which Keats bids himself lay aside (apparently) his Spenser,[5] in order to read again the more rousing and human-passionate pages of _Lear_. This is one of the last of his sonnets written in the Petrarchan form as followed by Milton and Wordsworth, and from henceforth he follows the Shakespearean form almost exclusively. On the 31st he writes to Reynolds in a rollicking mood, and sends him the lines to Apollo beginning 'Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,' part rant (the word is his own) pure and simple, part rant touched with genius, and giving words to a very frequent and intense phase of feeling in himself:-- Aye, when the soul is fled Too high above our head, Affrighted do we gaze After its airy maze, As doth a mother wild, When her young infant child Is in an eagle's claws-- And is not this the cause Of madness?--God of Song, Thou bearest me along Through, sights I scarce can bear: O let me, let me share With the hot lyre and thee, The staid Philosophy. Temper my lonely hours, And let me see thy bowers More unalarm'd!