O pang-dowered Poet, whose reverberant lips And heart-strung lyre awoke the moon’s eclipse,-- Thou whom the daisies glory in growing o’er,-- Their fragrance clings around thy name, not writ, But rumour’d in water, while the fame of it Along Time’s flood goes echoing evermore. I need hardly say that this sonnet seemed to me extremely noble in sentiment, and in music a glorious volume of sound. I felt, however, that it would be urged against it that it did not strike the keynote of the genius of Keats; that it would be said that in all the particulars in which Rossetti had truthfully and pathetically described London, Keats was in rather than of it; and that it would be affirmed that Keats lived in a fairy world of his own inventing, caring little for the storm and stress of London life. On the other hand, I knew it could be replied that Keats was not indifferent to the misery of city life; that it bore heavily upon him; that it came out powerfully and very sadly in his _Ode to the Nightingale_, and that it may have been from sheer torture in the contemplation of it that he fled away to a poetic world of his own creating. Moreover, Rossetti’s sonnet touched the life, rather than the genius, of Keats, and of this it struck the keynote in the opening lines. I ventured to think that the second and third lines wanted a little clarifying in the relation in which they stood. They seemed to be a sudden focussing of the laughter and weeping previously mentioned, rather than, what they were meant to be, a natural and necessary equipoise showing the inner life of Keats as contrasted with his outer life. To such an objection as this, Rossetti said: I am rather aghast for my own lucidity when I read what you say as to the first quatrain of my Keats sonnet. However, I always take these misconceptions as warnings to the Muse, and may probably alter the opening as below: The weltering London ways where children weep And girls whom none call maidens laugh,--strange road, Miring his outward steps who inly trode The bright Castalian brink and Latinos’ steep:-- Even such his life’s cross-paths: till deathly deep He toiled through sands of Lethe, etc. I ‘ll say more anent Keats anon.