ver, in respect to the light they throw upon the poet's
literary life that the letters are of highest significance. They
gratify to a reasonable extent that natural desire we all have to see
authorship in the act. The processes by which genius brings things to
pass are so mysterious that our curiosity is continually piqued; and
our failure to get at the real thing prompts us to be more or less
content with mere externals. If we may not hope to see the actual
process of making poetry, we may at least study the poet's manuscript.
By knowing of his habits of work we flatter ourselves that we are a
little nearer the secret of his power.

We must bear in mind that Keats was a boy, always a boy, and that he
died before he quite got out of boyhood. To be sure, most boys of
twenty-six would resent being described by so juvenile a term. But one
must have successfully passed twenty-six without doing anything in
particular to understand how exceedingly young twenty-six is. And to
have wrought so well in so short a time, Keats must have had from the
first a clear and noble conception of the nature of his work, as he
must also have displayed extraordinary diligence in the doing of it.
Perhaps these points are too obvious, and of a sort which would
naturally occur to any one; but it will be none the less interesting
to see how the letters bear witness to their truth.

In the first place, Keats was anything but a loafer at literature. He
seems never to have dawdled. A fine healthiness is apparent in all
allusions to his processes of work. 'I read and write about eight
hours a day,' he remarks in a letter to Haydon. Bailey, Keats's Oxford
friend, says that the fellow would go to his writing-desk soon after
breakfast, and stay there until two or three o'clock in the afternoon.
He was then writing _Endymion_. His stint was about 'fifty lines a
day, ... and he wrote with as much regularity, and apparently with as
much ease, as he wrote his letters.... Sometimes he fell short of his
allotted task, but not often, and he would make it up another day. But
he never forced himself.' Bailey quotes, in connection with this,
Keats's own remark to the effect that poetry would better not come at
all than not to come 'as naturally as the leaves of a tree.' Whether
this spontaneity of production was as great as that of some other
poets of his time may be questioned; but he would never have deserved
Tom Nash's sneer at those writers who can only produ