slips of taste which are a sort of _minus_ corresponding to the _plus_
of affectation, than it was (after _Queen Mab_ at least) to write
anything that was not poetry. Thus in addition to the literary
perfection of his letters, they have the _sine qua non_ of naturalness
in perfection also.

But with Keats things are different. Opinions differ as to whether he
ever quite reached maturity even in poetry to the extent into which
Shelley struck straight with _Alastor_, never losing it afterwards, and
leaving us only to wonder what conceivable accomplishment might have
even transcended _Adonais_ and its successors. That with all his
marvellous promise and hardly less marvellous achievement, Keats was
only reaching maturity when he died has been generally allowed by the
saner judgments.[31] Now _im_maturity has perhaps its own naturalness
which is sometimes, and in a way, very charming, but is not the
naturalness pure and simple of maturity. Children are sometimes, nay
often, very pretty, agreeable and amusing things: but there comes a time
when we rather wish they would go to the nursery. Perhaps the
"sometimes" occurs with Keats's earlier letters if not with his later.

[Sidenote: EDITING OF LETTERS]

He is thus also a text for the second part of our sermon--the duty of
editors and publishers of correspondence. There is much to be said for
the view that publication, as it has been put, "is an unpardonable sin,"
that is to say, that no author (or rather no author's ghost) can justly
complain if what he once deliberately published is, when all but the
control of the dead hand is off, republished. _Il l'a voulu_, as the
famous tag from Moliere has it. But letters in the stricter sense--that
is to say, pieces of private correspondence--are in very different case.
Not only were they, save in very few instances, never _meant_ for
publication: but, which is of even more importance, they were never
_prepared_ for publication.[32] Not only, again, did the writer never
see them in "proof," much less in "revise," as the technical terms go,
but he never, so far as we know, exercised on them even the revision
which all but the most careless authors give before sending their
manuscripts to the printer. Some people of course do read over their
letters before sending them: but it must be very rarely and in special,
not to say dubious, cases that they do this with a view to the thing
being seen by any other eyes than those of the intended