"How have you got on among them? How are the _Nymphs_? I suppose they have led you a fine dance. Where are you now?--in Judea, Cappadocia, or the parts of Lybia about Cyrene? Stranger from 'Heaven, Hues, and Prototypes' I wager you have given several new turns to the old saying, 'Now the maid was fair and pleasant to look on,' as well as made a little variation in 'Once upon a time.' Perhaps, too, you have rather varied, 'Here endeth the first lesson.' Thus I hope you have made a horseshoe business of 'unsuperfluous life,' 'faint bowers' and fibrous roots."[112] A letter written by Haydon to Keats, dated May 11, 1817, warned Keats against Hunt, and, with others of its kind, was possibly the insidious beginning of the coolness which followed: "Beware, for God's sake of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents and morality of our friend! He will go out of the world the victim of his own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to support injured by his own neglect of character."[113] A letter in reply from Keats, written the day after he wrote the passage about the _Nymphs_, accounts for its dissembling tone: "I wrote to Hunt yesterday--scarcely know what I said in it. I could not talk about Poetry in the way I should have liked for I was not in humour with either his or mine. His self delusions are very lamentable--they have inticed him into a Situation which I should be less eager after than that of a galley Slave,--what you observe thereon is very true must be in time [sic]. Perhaps it is a self delusion to say so--but I think I could not be deceived in the manner that Hunt is--may I die to-morrow if I am to be. There is no greater Sin after the seven deadly than to flatter oneself into the idea of being a great Poet...."[114]