I am ever afraid that your anxiety for me will lead you to fear for the violence of my temperament continually smothered down: for that reason I did not intend to have sent you the following sonnet--but Look over the two last pages and ask yourselves whether I have not that in me which will bear the buffets of the world. It will be the best comment on my sonnet; it will show you that it was written with no Agony but that of ignorance; with no thirst of anything but Knowledge when pushed to the point though the first steps to it were through my human passions--and perhaps I must confess a little bit of my heart-- Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell: No God, no Demon of severe response Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell.-- Then to my human heart I turn at once-- Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone; Say wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain! O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain! Why did I laugh? I know this being's lease; My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads: Yet could I on this very midnight cease And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds. Verse, fame and Beauty are intense indeed But Death intenser--Death is Life's High meed. I went to bed and enjoyed uninterrupted sleep. Sane I went to bed and sane I arose. This is yet another of those invocations to friendly Death to which he himself refers in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ written a few weeks later, and in its phrase 'on this very midnight cease' anticipates one of the great lines of the ode itself. No letter of Keats--or of any one--is richer than this of February to May 1819 in variety of mood and theme and interest. It contains two of the freshest and most luminous of his discursive passages of meditation on life and on the nature of the soul and the meaning of things: passages showing a native power of thought untrained indeed, but also unhampered, by academic knowledge and study, and hardly to be surpassed for their union of steady human common-sense with airy ease and play of imaginative speculation. In one, starting from reflections on the unforeseen way in which circumstances, like clouds, gather and burst, reflections suggested by the expected death of the father of his friend Haslam, he calls up a series of pictures of the instinctiveness with which men, like animals,--the hawk, the robin, the stoat, the deer,--go about their purposes; considers the rarity of the exceptional human beings whose disinterestedness helps on the progress of the world; and then turns his thoughts on himself with the comment,--