These two young poets, equally and conjointly beloved by posterity, were in truth at many points the most opposite-natured of men. Pride and sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy between them. Keats, with the rich elements of earthly clay in his composition, his lively vein of every-day common-sense and humour, his keen, tolerant delight and interest in the aspects and activities of nature and human nature as he found them, may well have been as much repelled as attracted by Shelley, Shelley the 'Elfin knight,' the spirit all air and fire, with his passionate repudiation of the world's ways and the world's law, his passionate absorption in his vision of a happier scheme of things, a vision engendered in humanitarian dreams from his readings of Rousseau and Godwin and Plato,--or was it rather one brought with him from some ante-natal sojourn among the radiances and serenities of the sunset clouds? Leigh Hunt's way of putting it is this:--'Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with ordinary flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of _Hyperion_, was so far inferior in universality to his great acquaintance, that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own hands.' Of the incidents and results of their intercourse at Hampstead we know little more than that Shelley, wisely enough in the light of his own headlong early experiments, tried to dissuade Keats from premature publication; and that Keats on his part declined, 'in order that he might have his own unfettered scope,' a cordial invitation from Shelley to come and stay with him at Great Marlow. Keats, though he must have known that he could learn much from Shelley's trained scholarship and fine literary sense, was doubtless right in feeling that whatever power of poetry might be in him must work its own way to maturity in freedom and not in leading-strings. To these scanty facts Shelley's cousin Medwin adds the statement that the two agreed to write in friendly rivalry the long poems each was severally meditating for his summer's work, Shelley _Laon and Cythna_, afterwards called _The Revolt of Islam_, and Keats _Endymion_. This may very well have been the case, but Medwin was a man so lax of memory, tongue, and pen that his evidence, unconfirmed, counts for little. Of the influence possibly exercised on Keats by Shelley's first important poem, _Alastor_, or by his _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_ printed in the _Examiner_ during the January of their intercourse at Hunt's, it will be time to speak later on.