developed
enormously in the interval between the periods of the two books, and,
being conscious of this, Rossetti used to say in his later years that he
would never again write poems as from his own person.

You say an excellent thing [he writes] when you ask, "Where
can we look for more poetry per page than Keats furnishes?"
It is strange that there is not yet one complete edition of
him. {*} No doubt the desideratum (so far as care and
exhaustiveness go), will be supplied when

Forman's edition appears. He is a good appreciator too, as I
have reason to say. You will think it strange that I have
not seen the Keats love-letters, but I mean to do so.
However, I am told they add nothing to one's idea of his
epistolary powers.... I hear sometimes from Buxton Forman,
and was sending him the other day an extract (from a book
called _The Unseen World_) which doubtless bears on the
superstition which Keats intended to develope in his lovely
_Eve of St. Mark_--a fragment which seems to me to rank with
_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_, as a clear advance in direct
simplicity.... You ought to have my recent Keats sonnet, so
I send it. Your own plan, for one on the same subject, seems
to me most beautiful. Do it at once. You will see that mine
is again concerned with the epitaph, and perhaps my reviving
the latter in writing you was the cause of the sonnet.

* Rossetti afterwards admitted in conversation that the
Aldine Edition seemed complete, though I think he did not
approve of the chronological arrangement therein adopted; at
least he thought that arrangement had many serious
disadvantages.

Rossetti formed a very different opinion of Keats's love-letters, when,
a year later, he came to read them. At first he shared the general view
that letters so _intimes_ should never have been made public. Afterwards
the book had irresistible charms for him, from the first page whereon
his old friend, Mr. Bell Scott, has vigorously etched Severn's drawing
of the once redundant locks of rich hair, dank and matted over
the forehead cold with the death-dew, down to the last line of the
letterpress. He thought Mr. Forman's work admirably done, and as for the
letters themselves, he believed they placed Keats indisputably among
the highest masters of English epistolary style. He considered that all
Keats's letters proved h