bling moisture shake."

From the opening lines of this poem I gather that Keats, when he wrote
it, had never been in love; but that he had a feeling towards pure,
sweet-minded, lovely women, which made him, in idea, their champion and
votary. Later on, in June 1818, he wrote to Bailey that his love for his
brothers had "always stifled the impression that any woman might
otherwise have made upon him." And in July of the same year, also to
Bailey:--

"I am certain that our fair friends [_i.e._ the Misses Reynolds]
are glad I should come for the mere sake of my coming; but I am
certain I bring with me a vexation they are better without.... I
am certain I have not a right feeling towards women: at this
moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it
because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I
was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind
was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew
it not. I have no right to expect more than their reality. I
thought them ethereal--above men; I find them perhaps
equal--great by comparison is very small. Insult may be inflicted
in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of being
insulted does not like to _think_ an insult against another. I do
not like to think insults in a lady's company; I commit a crime
with her which absence would not have known.... When I am among
women I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be
silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing;
I am in a hurry to be gone. You must be charitable, and put all
this perversity to my being disappointed since my boyhood....
After all, I do think better of womankind than to suppose they
care whether Mister John Keats, five feet high, likes them or
not."

In his letter about Miss Cox as "Charmian," written perhaps just before
he knew Miss Brawne, Keats said: "I hope I shall never marry.... The
mighty abstract idea of Beauty in all things I have stifles the more
divided and minute domestic happiness. An amiable wife and sweet
children I contemplate as part of that Beauty, but I must have a
thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart.... These
things, combined with the opinion I have formed of the generality of
women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a
sugar-plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony whic