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
quite feeble sonnets in the Wordsworthian form, among them one on the
peace of Paris in 1814, one on Chatterton and one on Byron.
Of Keats's outward ways and doings during these days when he was growing
to manhood we know nothing directly except from Cowden Clarke, and can
only gather a little more by inference. It is clear that he enjoyed a
certain amount of liberty and holiday, more, perhaps, than would have
fallen to the lot of a more zealous apprentice, and that he spent part
of his free time in London in the society of his brother George, at this
time a clerk in Mr Abbey's counting-house, and of friends to whom George
made him known. Among these were the family of an officer of marines
named Wylie, to whose charming daughter, Georgiana, George Keats a
little later became engaged, and another family of prosperous
tradespeople named Mathew. Here too there were daughters, Caroline and
Ann, who made themselves pleasant to the Keats brothers, and to whom
were addressed the pair of complimentary jingles already mentioned. One
of the sisters, asked in later life for her recollections of the time,
replied in a weariful strain of evangelical penitence for the
frivolities of those days, and found nothing more to the purpose to say
of Keats than this:--'I cannot go further than say I always thought he
had a very beautiful countenance and was very warm and enthusiastic in
his character. He wrote a great deal of poetry at our house but I do not
recollect whether I ever had any of it, I certainly have none now; Ann
had many pieces of his.' A cousin of this family, one George Felton
Mathew, was a youth of sensibility and poetical leanings, and became for
a time an intimate friend of Keats, and next to his brothers and Cowden
Clarke the closest confidant of his studies and ambitions. Their
intimacy began in the Edmonton days and lasted through the earlier
months of his student life in London. Looking back upon their relations
after some thirty years, Mr Felton Mathew, then a supernumerary official
of the Poor Law Board, struggling meekly under the combined strain of a
precarious income, a family of twelve children, and a turn for the
interpretation of prophecy, wrote as follows:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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