satisfy Mr. Watson that in so doing he was not
listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall. For the general public,
the wall is down, and the door containing the keyhole thrown open.
Perhaps our duty is not to look. I, for one, wish that great men would
not leave their love letters around. Nay, I wish you a better wish
than that: it is that the perfect taste of the gentleman and scholar
who gave us in its present form the correspondence of Carlyle and
Emerson, the early and later letters of Carlyle, and the letters of
Lowell might have control of the private papers of every man of genius
whose teachings the world holds dear. He would need for this an
indefinite lease upon life; but since I am wishing, let me wish
largely. There is need of such wishing. Many editors have been called,
and only two or three chosen.

But why one who reads the letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne should have
any other feeling than that of pity for a poor fellow who was so
desperately in love as to be wretched because of it I do not see. Even
a cynic will grant that Keats was not disgraced, since it is very
clear that he did not yield readily to what Dr. Holmes calls the great
passion. He had a complacent boyish superiority of attitude with
respect to all those who are weak enough to love women. 'Nothing,' he
says, 'strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love.
A man in love I do think cuts the sorryest figure in the world. Even
when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it I could burst
out laughing in his face. His pathetic visage becomes irresistible.'
Then he speaks of that dinner party of stutterers and squinters
described in the _Spectator_, and says that it would please him more
'to scrape together a party of lovers.' If this letter be genuine and
the date of it correctly given, it was written three months after he
had succumbed to the attractions of Fanny Brawne. Perhaps he was
trying to brave it out, as one may laugh to conceal embarrassment.

In a much earlier letter than this he hopes he shall never marry, but
nevertheless has a good deal to say about a young lady with fine eyes
and fine manners and a 'rich Eastern look.' He discovers that he can
talk to her without being uncomfortable or ill at ease. 'I am too much
occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble.... She kept me
awake one night as a tune of Mozart's might do.... I don't cry to take
the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave