My spirit is too weak--mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep. And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky. Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep That I have not the cloudy winds to keep, Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye. Such dim-conceived glories of the brain Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old Time--with a billowy main-- A sun--a shadow of a magnitude. He sends this with a covering sonnet to Haydon asking pardon for its immaturity and justly praising the part played by Haydon in forcing the acceptance of the marbles upon the nation:-- Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak Definitely on these mighty things; Forgive me that I have not Eagle's wings-- That what I want I know not where to seek; And think that I would not be over meek In rolling out upfollow'd thunderings, Even to the steep of Heliconian springs, Were I of ample strength for such a freak-- Think too, that all those numbers should be thine; Whose else? In this who touch thy vesture's hem? For when men star'd at what was most divine With browless idiotism--o'erwise phlegm-- Thou hadst beheld the Hesperian shine Of their star in the East, and gone to worship them. Haydon's acknowledgment is of course enthusiastic, but betrays his unfortunate gift for fustian in the following precious expansion of Keats's image of the sick eagle:-- Many thanks, my dear fellow, for your two noble sonnets. I know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects of their seeking.... In Haydon's journal about the same date there is an entry which reads with ironical pathos in the light of after events:--'Keats is a man after my own heart. He sympathises with me, and comprehends me. We saw through each other, and I hope are friends for ever. I only know that, if I sell my picture, Keats shall never want till another is done, that he may have leisure for his effusions: in short he shall never want all his life.' To Keats himself, more hyperbolically still, and in terms still more suited to draw the pitying smile of the ironic gods, Haydon writes a little later:--