I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a Woman has haunted me these two days--at such a time when the relief, the feverish relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has conquered--I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life--I feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of immortality. What he calls the abstractions into which he had plunged for relief were the conceptions of the fallen Titans, 'the characters of Saturn and Ops' at the beginning of _Hyperion_. Those conceptions were just beginning to clothe themselves in his mind in the verses which every English reader knows, verses of a cadence as majestic and pathetic almost as any in the language, yet scarcely more charged with high emotion or more pregnant with the sense and pressure of destiny than some of the prose of his familiar letters written about the same time. His only other attempt in poetry during those weeks was a translation from a sonnet of Ronsard, whose works Taylor had lent him and from whom he got some hints for the names and characters of his Titans. As the autumn wore on the task of the watcher grew ever more sorrowful and absorbing, he was obliged to desist from poetry for the time. But his correspondence shows no flagging. Towards the middle of October he began, marking it as A, the first of the series of journal-letters to his brother and sister in America, which give us during the next fifteen months a picture of his outward and inward being fuller and richer than we possess from any other poet, and except in one single particular absolutely unreserved. Despatching the packet on his birthday, that is October 29 or 31, he explains why it is not longer (it is over 7,000 words): 'Tom is rather more easy than he has been: but is still so nervous that I cannot speak to him of these Matters--indeed it is the care I have had to keep his mind aloof from feelings too acute that has made this letter so short a one--I did not like to write before him a letter he knew was to reach your hands--I cannot even now ask him for any Message--his heart speaks to you. Be as happy as you can.' Keats had begun by warning George and his wife, in language of beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to prepare their minds for the worst, and assuring them of the comfort he took in the thoughts of them:--'I have Fanny and I have you--three people whose Happiness to me is sacred--and it does annul that selfish sorrow which I should otherwise fall into, living as I do with poor Tom who looks upon me as his only comfort--the tears will come into your Eyes--let them--and embrace each other--thank heaven for what happiness you have, and after thinking a moment or two that you suffer in common with all Mankind hold it not a sin to regain your cheerfulness.' Between the opening and the closing note of tenderness, the letter runs through