ed. The "Ode to a
Nightingale" was composed at Hampstead in the spring of 1819 _after
breakfast_, forming two or three hours' work: thus we see that the
nocturnal imagery of the ode was a general or a particular reminiscence,
not actual to the very moment of composition. This poem and the "Ode on
a Grecian Urn" were recited by Keats to Haydon in a chaunting tone in
Kilburn meadows, and were published in the serial entitled "Annals of
the Fine Arts." The urn thus immortalized may probably be one preserved
in the garden of Holland House.

With the "Lamia" volume we have come to the close of what Keats
published during his lifetime. Something remains to be said of other
writings of his--almost all of them earlier in date than the publication
of that volume--which remained imprinted or uncollected at the time of
his death.

In February 1818 Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Shelley, undertook to write a
sonnet each upon the river Nile. In order of merit, the three sonnets
are the reverse of what one might have been willing to forecast. I at
least am clearly of opinion that Hunt's sonnet is the best (though with
a weak ending), Keats's the second, and Shelley's a decidedly bad third.
The leading thought in each sonnet is characteristic of its author.
Keats adheres to the simple natural facts of the case, while Hunt and
Shelley turn the Nile into a moral or intellectual symbol. Keats says
essentially that to associate the Nile with ideas of antique desolation
is but a delusion of ignorance, for this river is really rich and fresh
like others. Hunt makes the Egyptian stream an emblem of history tending
towards the progress of the individual and the race; while Shelley reads
into the Nile a lesson of the good and the evil inhering in knowledge.

"The Eve of St. Mark"--a fragment which very few of Keats's completed
poems can rival in point of artist-like feeling and writing--belongs to
the years 1818-9. I find nothing in print to account for his leaving it
unfinished.

In May 1819 Keats had an idea of inventing a new structure of
sonnet-rhyme; and he sent to his brother and sister-in-law a sonnet
composed accordingly, beginning--

"If by dull rhymes our English must be chained."

He wrote: "I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet-stanza
than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language well, from the
pouncing rhymes. The other appears too elegiac, and the couplet at the
end of it has seldom a pleasing effect.