me--what a want of knowledge! She
walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn to her
with a magnetic power; this they call flirting! They do not know
things; they do not know what a woman is. I believe, though, she
has faults, the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had.
Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for there are
two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things:--the
worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical; and the unearthly,
spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron,
and this Charmian, hold the first place in our mind; in the
latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle,
and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man of
the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal
being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me,
and I should like you to save me."

So much for Miss Cox, the Charmian whom Keats was not in love with. This
is not absolutely the sole mention of her in his letters, but it is the
only one of importance. We now turn to Miss Brawne, the young lady with
whom he had fallen very much in love at a date even preceding that to
which the present description must belong. The description comes from a
letter to George and Georgiana Keats, written probably towards the
middle of December 1818. It is true that the name Brawne does not appear
in the printed version of the letter, but the "very positive
conviction" expressed by Mr. Forman that that name really does stand in
the MS., a conviction "shared by members of her family," may safely be
adopted by all my readers. I therefore insert the name where a blank had
heretofore appeared in print.

"Perhaps, as you are fond of giving me sketches of characters,
you may like a little picnic of scandal, even across the
Atlantic. Shall I give you Miss Brawne? She is about my height,
with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort. She
wants sentiment in every feature. She manages to make her hair
look well; her nostrils are very fine, though a little painful;
her mouth is bad, and good; her profile is better than her full
face, which indeed is not 'full,' but pale and thin, without
showing any bone; her shape is very graceful, and so are her
movements; her arms are good, her hands bad-ish, her feet
tolerable. She is not seventeen [Keats, if he really wrote 'not
sev