And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.

"Why four kisses?" he writes to his brother:--

Why four kisses--you will say--why four? Because I wish to restrain
the headlong impetuosity of my Muse--she would have fain said
"score" without hurting the rhyme--but we must temper the
imagination, as the critics say, with judgment. I was obliged to
choose an even number, that both eyes might have fair play, and to
speak truly I think two apiece quite sufficient. Suppose I had said
seven, there would have been three and-a-half apiece--a very
awkward affair, and well got out of on my side.

That was written nearly a year after the famous _Quarterly_ article on
_Endymion_, in which the reviewer had so severely taken to task "Mr.
Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his
senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody)." It suggests that
Keats retained at least a certain share of good spirits, in spite of the
_Quarterly_ and Fanny Brawne and the approach of death. His observation,
too, was often that of a spirited common-sense realist rather than an
aesthete, as in his first description of Fanny Brawne:--

She is about my height--with a fine style and countenance of the
lengthened sort--she wants sentiment in every feature--she manages
to make her hair look well--her nostrils are 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 [nineteen?]--but she is ignorant
monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling
people such names--that I was forced lately to make use of the term
_minx_; this is, I think, not from any innate vice but from a
penchant she has of acting stylishly. I am, however, tired of such
style, and shall decline any more of it.

Yet before many months he was writing to the "minx," "I will imagine you
Venus to-night, and pray, pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen."
Certain it is, as I have already said, that it was after his meeting
with Fanny Brawne that he grew, as in a night, into a great poet. Let us
not then abuse Keats's passion for her as vulgar. And let us not attempt
to make