It was Leigh Hunt who introduced Keats to ‘the old man eloquent’—S. T. Coleridge—whom they met when walking in the fields between Highgate and Hampstead—the upland fields that offered such fair views in those days to the lovers of them. They walked with him two miles, at the end of which Keats tells us that, though the sage had broached a hundred subjects, all he knew was that he had heard his voice as he came towards them, and heard it as he moved away—and all the interim, if he might so express it; but apparently the discourse had no sequence or conclusion, except that utterance of the mild, then somewhat fatuous-looking old man; that it was just as well he did not comprehend, who, after shaking hands with Keats, turned to Leigh Hunt, who lingered in bidding the author of ‘Christabel’ and ‘The Ancient Mariner’ farewell, and whispered to him that he felt death in the touch of the young poet’s hand. Mrs. Cowden Clarke tells us that Charles C. Clarke introduced Keats, his old friend and schoolmate, to Leigh Hunt in his Vale of Health cottage. But this is a mistake; Hunt himself, in his Autobiography, distinctly says: ‘_It was not at Hampstead that I first saw Keats_; it was in York Buildings, in the New Road’ (now Euston Road), ‘No. 8, where I wrote part of the “Indicator,” and he resided with me in Mortimer Terrace, Kentish Town, No. 13, where I concluded it.’ Leigh Hunt’s tenancy of his little Vale of Health cottage was but a short one; he went there, as we have seen, in 1816, and early in 1819 we find him writing to C. C. Clarke: ‘As we must certainly move, we have made up our minds to move to Kentish Town, which is a sort of compromise between London and our beloved Hampstead. The London end touches so nearly Camden Town, which is so near London, that Marianne will not be afraid of my returning from the theatres at night, and the country is extremely quiet and rural, running to the woods, and the shops between Hampstead and Highgate.’ Accordingly, on February 15, 1819, he writes from Mortimer Terrace: ‘Hampstead is now in my eye—hill, trees, church, and all the slope of Caen Wood, to my right, and Primrose and Haverstock Hills, with Steele’s cottage, to my left.’ [Illustration: _Charles Lamb._]