been aroused by much that he found in
Wordsworth. It was Wordsworth he meant when he said, 'Every man has
his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them
till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself,'--a sentence, by
the way, quite as unconsciously funny as some of the things he laughed
at in the works of his great contemporary.

It will be pertinent to quote here two or three of the good critical
words which Keats scattered through his letters. Emphasizing the use
of simple means in his art, he says, 'I think that poetry should
surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike
the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost
a remembrance.'

'We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.... Poetry should
be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and
does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.' Or
as Ruskin has put the thing with respect to painting, 'Entirely
first-rate work is so quiet and natural that there can be no dispute
over it.'

Keats appears to have been in no sense a hermit. With the exception of
Byron, he was perhaps less of a recluse than any of his poetical
contemporaries. With respect to society he frequently practiced total
abstinence; but the world was amusing, and he liked it. He was fond of
the theatre, fond of whist, fond of visiting the studios, fond of
going to the houses of his friends. But he would run no risks; he was
shy and he was proud. He dreaded contact with the ultra-fashionables.
Naturally, his opportunities for such intercourse were limited, but he
cheerfully neglected his opportunities. I doubt if he ever bewailed
his humble origin; nevertheless, the constitution of English society
would hardly admit of his forgetting it. He had that pardonable pride
which will not allow a man to place himself among those who, though
outwardly fair-spoken, offer the insult of a hostile and patronizing
mental attitude.

Most of his friendships were with men, and this is to his credit. The
man is spiritually warped who is incapable of a deep and abiding
friendship with one of his own sex; and to go a step farther, that man
is utterly to be distrusted whose only friends are among women. We may
not be prepared to accept the radical position of a certain young
thinker, who proclaims, in season, but defiantly, that 'men are the
idealists, after all;' yet it is easy to comprehend how one