Of the Devonshire girls Keats thought better than of their menkind, and writes and rimes on them with a certain skittishness of admiration. With one local family, a Mrs Jeffrey and her daughters, he and his brothers were on terms of warm friendship, as is shown by his correspondence with them a year later. One of the daughters married afterwards a Mr Prowse, and published two volumes of very tolerable sentimental verse: some of their contents, as interpreted (says Mr Buxton Forman) by Teignmouth tradition, would indicate that her heart had been very deeply touched by the young poet during his stay: but of responsive feelings on his own part his letters give no hint, and it was only a few weeks later that he wrote how his love for his brothers had hitherto stifled any impression that a woman might have made on him. Besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering the invalid Tom, who had a relapse just after he came down, Keats was busy during these Devonshire days seeing through the press the last sheets of _Endymion_. He also composed, with the exception of the few verses he had begun at Hampstead, the whole of _Isabella_ or _The Pot of Basil_, the first of his longer poems written with real maturity of art and certainty of touch. At the same time, no doubt with his great intended effort, _Hyperion_, in mind, he was studying and appreciating Milton as he had never done before. He had been steeped since boyhood in the charm of the minor poems, from the _Vacation Exercise_ to _Lycidas_, and had read but not greatly cared for _Paradise Lost_, until first Severn, and then more energetically Bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to him: and he now threw himself upon that poem, and penetrated with the grasp and swiftness of genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the very essence of its power and beauty. His correspondence with his friends, particularly Bailey and Reynolds, is during this same time unusually sustained and full. Sometimes his vein is light and titterly (to use a word of his own) as I have indicated, and sometimes he masks an anxious heart beneath a lively manner, as thus:-- But ah Coward! to talk at this rate to a sick man, or, I hope, to one that was sick--for I hope by this you stand on your right foot. If you are not--that's all,--I intend to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds to cut Sickness--a fellow to whom I have a complete aversion, and who strange to say is harboured and countenanced in several houses where I visit--he is sitting now quite impudent between me and Tom--he insults me at poor Jem Rice's--and you have seated him before now between us at the Theatre, when I thought he looked with a longing eye at poor Kean. I shall say, once for all, to my friends, generally and severally, cut that fellow, or I cut you.