At intervals throughout these two months Keats asserts and re-asserts the strength of the hold which idleness has laid upon him so far as poetry is concerned. Thus on March 13 to his brother and sister-in-law:--'I know not why poetry and I have been so distant lately; I must make some advances or she will cut me entirely': and again to the same on April 15, 'I am still at a standstill in versifying, I cannot do it yet with any pleasure.' To his young sister Fanny he had written two days earlier that his idleness had been growing upon him of late, 'so that it will require a great shake to get rid of it. I have written nothing and almost read nothing--but I must turn over a new leaf.' Within the next two weeks the dormant impulse began to re-awake in him with power. As we have seen, he had never quite stopped writing personal sonnets. Towards the end of the month we find him trying, not very successfully, to invent a new sonnet form, but soon reverting to his accustomed Shakespearean type of three quatrains closed by a couplet. Here is the better of two sonnets which he wrote on April 30 to express the present abatement of his former hot desire for fame:-- Fame, like a wayward Girl, will still be coy To those who woo her with too slavish knees, But makes surrender to some thoughtless Boy, And dotes the more upon a heart at ease; She is a Gipsy, will not speak to those Who have not learnt to be content without her; A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close, Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her; A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born, Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar; Ye love-sick Bards, repay her scorn for scorn, Ye Artists lovelorn, madmen that ye are! Make your best bow to her and bid adieu, Then, if she likes it, she will follow you. The thought here is curiously anticipated in a passage of Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_, itself reminiscent of a well known line in Theocritus. Is the coincidence a coincidence merely, or had the lines from Browne been working unconsciously in Keats's mind? True Fame is ever liken'd to our shade, He sooneth misseth her, that most hath made To overtake her; who so takes his wing, Regardless of her, she'll be following: Her true proprieties she thus discovers, 'Loves her contemners and contemns her Lovers.'[10]