I think I have never told you how very much I like your _Amyntas_; it almost reconciles me to translations. In another sense I still demur. You might have written another such a poem as the _Nymphs_, with no access of efforts. I am full of thoughts and plans, and should do something, if the feeble and irritable frame which incloses it was willing to obey the spirit. I fancy that then I should do great things. Before this you will have seen _Adonais_. Lord Byron, I suppose from modesty, on account of his being mentioned in it, did not say a word of _Adonais_, though he was loud in his praise of _Prometheus_, and, what you will not agree with him in, censure of the _Cenci_. Certainly, if _Marino Faliero_ is a drama, the _Cenci_ is not--but that between ourselves. Lord Byron is reformed, as far as gallantry goes, and lives with a beautiful and sentimental Italian lady, who is as much attached to him as may be. I trust greatly to his intercourse with you, for his creed to become as pure as he thinks his conduct is. He has many generous and exalted qualities, but the canker of aristocracy wants to be cut out. JOHN KEATS 1795-1821 To JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS _Burns's cottage_ Maybole, 11 _July_ [1818]. MY DEAR REYNOLDS, ... I am approaching Burns's cottage very fast. We have made continual inquiries from the time we saw his tomb at Dumfries. His name, of course, is known all about: his great reputation among the plodding people is, 'that he wrote a good _mony_ sensible things'. One of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a shrine as the Cottage of Burns: we need not think of his misery--that is all gone, bad luck to it! I shall look upon it hereafter with unmixed pleasure, as I do my Stratford-on-Avon day with Bailey. I shall fill this sheet for you in the Bardie's country, going no further than this, till I get to the town of Ayr, which will be a nine miles' walk to tea.