im to be no weakling, and that whatever walk
he had chosen he must have been a master. He seemed particularly struck
with the apparently intuitive perception of Shakspeare's subtlest
meanings, which certain of the letters display. In a note he said:

Forman gave me a copy of Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne.
The silhouette given of the lady is sadly disenchanting, and
may be the strongest proof existing of how much a man may
know about abstract Beauty without having an artist's eye
for the outside of it.

The Keats sonnet, as first shown to me, ran as follows:

The weltering London ways where children weep,--
Where girls whom none call maidens laugh, where gain,
Hurrying men's steps, is yet by loss o'erta'en:--
The bright Castalian brink and Latinos' steep:--
Such were his paths, till deeper and more deep,
He trod the sands of Lethe; and long pain,
Weary with labour spurned and love found vain,
In dead Rome's sheltering shadow wrapped his sleep.

O pang-dowered Poet, whose reverberant lips
And heart-strung lyre awoke the moon's eclipse,--
Thou whom the daisies glory in growing o'er,--
Their fragrance clings around thy name, not writ,
But rumour'd in water, while the fame of it
Along Time's flood goes echoing evermore.

I need hardly say that this sonnet seemed to me extremely noble in
sentiment, and in music a glorious volume of sound. I felt, however,
that it would be urged against it that it did not strike the keynote of
the genius of Keats; that it would be said that in all the particulars
in which Rossetti had truthfully and pathetically described London,
Keats was in rather than of it; and that it would be affirmed that Keats
lived in a fairy world of his own inventing, caring little for the storm
and stress of London life. On the other hand, I knew it could be replied
that Keats was not indifferent to the misery of city life; that it bore
heavily upon him; that it came out powerfully and very sadly in his _Ode
to the Nightingale_, and that it may have been from sheer torture in
the contemplation of it that he fled away to a poetic world of his own
creating. Moreover, Rossetti's sonnet touched the life, rather than
the genius, of Keats, and of this it struck the keynote in the opening
lines. I ventured to think that the second and third lines wanted a
little clarifying in the relation in which they