of pugnacity. His
face was rather long than otherwise. The upper lip projected a
little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the
eyes mellow and glowing--large, dark, and sensitive. At the
recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought, they would
suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled. In this there was
ill-health as well as imagination, for he did not like these
betrayals of emotion; and he had great personal as well as moral
courage. His hair, of a brown colour, was fine, and hung in
natural ringlets. The head was a puzzle for the phrenologists,
being remarkably small in the skull; a singularity which he had
in common with Byron and Shelley, whose hats I could not get on.
Keats was sensible of the disproportion above noticed between his
upper and lower extremities; and he would look at his hand, which
was faded, and swollen in the veins, and say it was the hand of a
man of fifty."

Cowden Clarke confirms Hunt in stating that Keats's hair was brown, and
he assigns the same colour, or dark hazel, to his eyes: confuting the
"auburn" and "blue" of which Mrs. Procter had spoken. It is rather
remarkable that, while Hunt speaks of the projection of the _upper_
lip--a detail which is fully verified in a charcoal drawing by
Severn--Lord Houghton observes upon "the undue prominence of the
_lower_ lip," which point I cannot trace clearly in any one of the
portraits. Keats himself, in one of his love-letters (August 1819),
says, "I do not think myself a fright." According to Clarke, John Keats
was the only one of the family who resembled the father in person and
feature, while the other three resembled the mother. George Keats does
not wholly coincide in this, for he says, "My mother resembled John very
much in the face;" at the same time he would not have been qualified to
deny a likeness to the father, of whom he remembered nothing except that
he had dark hair. The lady who saw Keats's hair and eyes of the wrong
colour saw at any rate his face to some effect, having left it recorded
thus: "His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and
brightness; it had an expression as if he had been looking on some
glorious sight." In a like spirit, Haydon speaks of Keats as having "an
eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess
who saw visions." His voice was deep and grave.

Let us now turn to the portraits, which are as nume