letters.

The legendary Keats dies hard; or perhaps we would better say that
when he seems to be dying he is simply, in the good old fashion of
legends, taking out a new lease of life. For it is as true now as when
the sentence was first penned, that 'a mixture of a lie doth ever add
pleasure.' Among the many readers of good books, there will always be
some whose notions of the poetical proprieties suffer greatly by the
facts of Keats's history. It is so much pleasanter to them to think
that the poet's sensitive spirit was wounded to death by bitter words
than to know that he was carried off by pulmonary disease. But when
they are tired of reading _Endymion_, _Isabella_, and _The Eve of St.
Agnes_ in the light of this incorrect conception, let them try a new
reading in the light of the letters, and the masculinity of this very
robust young maker of poetry will prove refreshing.

The letters are in every respect good reading. Rather than deplore
their frankness, as one critic has done, we ought to rejoice in their
utter want of affectation, in their boyish honesty. At every turn
there is something to amuse or to startle one into thinking. We are
carried back in a vivid way to the period of their composition. Not a
little of the pulsing life of that time throbs anew, and we catch
glimpses of notable figures. Often, the feeling is that we have been
called in haste to a window to look at some celebrity passing by, and
have arrived just in time to see him turn the corner. What a touch of
reality, for example, does one get in reading that 'Wordsworth went
rather huff'd out of town'! One is not in the habit of thinking of
Wordsworth as capable of being 'huffed,' but the writer of the letters
feared that he was. All of Keats's petty anxieties and small doings,
as well as his aspirations and his greatest dreams, are set down here
in black on white. It is a complete and charming revelation of the
man. One learns how he 'went to Hazlitt's lecture on Poetry, and got
there just as they were coming out;' how he was insulted at the
theatre, and wouldn't tell his brothers; how it vexed him because the
Irish servant said that his picture of Shakespeare looked exactly like
her father, only 'her father had more color than the engraving;' how
he filled in the time while waiting for the stage to start by counting
the buns and tarts in a pastry-cook's window, 'and had just begun on
the jellies;' how indignant he was at being spoken of as 'q