Cowden Clarke had kept up his acquaintance with Leigh Hunt, and was in the habit of going up to visit him at the cottage where he was now living at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health. Some time in the late spring of 1816 Clarke made known to Hunt first some of Keats's efforts in poetry and then Keats himself. Both Clarke and Hunt have told the story, both writing at a considerable, and Clarke at a very long, interval after the event. In their main substance the two accounts agree, but both are in some points confused, telescoping together, as memory is apt to do, circumstances really separated by an interval of months. One firm fact we have to start with,--that Hunt printed in his paper, the _Examiner_, for May 5th, 1816, Keats's sonnet, _O Solitude, if I with thee must dwell_. This was Keats's first appearance in print, and a decisive circumstance in his life. Clarke, it appears, had taken up the 'Solitude' sonnet and a few other manuscript verses of Keats to submit to Leigh Hunt for his opinion,[6] and had every reason to be gratified at the result. Here is his story of what happened. I took with me two or three of the poems I had received from Keats. I could not but anticipate that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and indeed approvingly, of the compositions--written, too, by a youth under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty lines of the first poem. Horace Smith happened to be there on the occasion, and he was not less demonstrative in his appreciation of their merits.... After making numerous and eager inquiries about him personally, and with reference to any peculiarities of mind and manner, the visit ended in my being requested to bring him over to the Vale of Health. That was a 'red-letter day' in the young poet's life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts. The character and expression of Keats's features would arrest even the casual passenger in the street; and now they were wrought to a tone of animation that I could not but watch with interest, knowing what was in store for him from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention, with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to encounter and receive. As we approached the Heath, there was the rising and accelerated step, with the gradual subsidence of all talk. The interview, which stretched into three 'morning calls,' was the prelude to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its neighbourhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed. In connexion with this, take Hunt's own account of the matter, as given about ten years after the event in his volume, _Lord Byron and his Contemporaries_: