Forman’s edition appears. He is a good appreciator too, as I have reason to say. You will think it strange that I have not seen the Keats love-letters, but I mean to do so. However, I am told they add nothing to one’s idea of his epistolary powers.... I hear sometimes from Buxton Forman, and was sending him the other day an extract (from a book called _The Unseen World_) which doubtless bears on the superstition which Keats intended to develope in his lovely _Eve of St. Mark_--a fragment which seems to me to rank with _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_, as a clear advance in direct simplicity.... You ought to have my recent Keats sonnet, so I send it. Your own plan, for one on the same subject, seems to me most beautiful. Do it at once. You will see that mine is again concerned with the epitaph, and perhaps my reviving the latter in writing you was the cause of the sonnet. * Rossetti afterwards admitted in conversation that the Aldine Edition seemed complete, though I think he did not approve of the chronological arrangement therein adopted; at least he thought that arrangement had many serious disadvantages. Rossetti formed a very different opinion of Keats’s love-letters, when, a year later, he came to read them. At first he shared the general view that letters so _intimes_ should never have been made public. Afterwards the book had irresistible charms for him, from the first page whereon his old friend, Mr. Bell Scott, has vigorously etched Severn’s drawing of the once redundant locks of rich hair, dank and matted over the forehead cold with the death-dew, down to the last line of the letterpress. He thought Mr. Forman’s work admirably done, and as for the letters themselves, he believed they placed Keats indisputably among the highest masters of English epistolary style. He considered that all Keats’s letters proved him to be no weakling, and that whatever walk he had chosen he must have been a master. He seemed particularly struck with the apparently intuitive perception of Shakspeare’s subtlest meanings, which certain of the letters display. In a note he said: Forman gave me a copy of Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne. The silhouette given of the lady is sadly disenchanting, and may be the strongest proof existing of how much a man may know about abstract Beauty without having an artist’s eye for the outside of it. The Keats sonnet, as first shown to me, ran as follows: The weltering London ways where children weep,-- Where girls whom none call maidens laugh, where gain, Hurrying men’s steps, is yet by loss o’erta’en:-- The bright Castalian brink and Latinos’ steep:-- Such were his paths, till deeper and more deep, He trod the sands of Lethe; and long pain, Weary with labour spurned and love found vain, In dead Rome’s sheltering shadow wrapped his sleep.