some hope that, while it is
dwindling, I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit
to live.

"This may be speaking too presumptuously, and may deserve a
punishment. But no feeling man will be forward to inflict it; he
will leave me alone with the conviction that there is not a
fiercer hell than the failure in a great object. This is not
written with the least atom of purpose to forestall criticisms of
course, but from the desire I have to conciliate men who are
competent to look, and who do look, with a zealous eye to the
honour of English literature.

"The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination
of a man is healthy. But there is a space of life between in
which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way
of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted. Thence proceeds
mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak
of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages.

"I hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful
mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness; for I wish to try
once more before I bid it farewell."

No one can deny that this is a modest preface; it is in fact too modest,
and concedes to the adversary the utmost which could possibly be at
issue, viz., whether the poem was worth publishing or not. The only
scintilla of self-assertion in it is the hope expressed-"_some_
hope"--that the writer might eventually produce "verses fit to live;"
and less than that no man who puts a poem before the public could be
expected to postulate. Keats must therefore be expressly acquitted of
having done anything to excite animosity or retaliation on the part of
his critics; the sole thing which could be attacked was the poem
itself--too frankly pronounced indefensible--or else something in the
author which did not appear within the covers of his volume. The preface
is indeed manly as well as modest; there is not a servile or obsequious
word in it; yet I cannot help thinking that Keats, when later on he
found "Endymion" denounced as drivel, must at times have wished that he
had been a little less deferential to Reynolds's objections, and had not
so explicitly admitted that not one of the four books of the poem was
qualified to "pass the press." An adverse reviewer was sure to take
advantage of that admission, and did so.

It would be interesting to compare with the preface which Ke