stood. They seemed to
be a sudden focussing of the laughter and weeping previously mentioned,
rather than, what they were meant to be, a natural and necessary
equipoise showing the inner life of Keats as contrasted with his outer
life. To such an objection as this, Rossetti said:

I am rather aghast for my own lucidity when I read what you
say as to the first quatrain of my Keats sonnet. However, I
always take these misconceptions as warnings to the Muse,
and may probably alter the opening as below:

The weltering London ways where children weep
And girls whom none call maidens laugh,--strange road,
Miring his outward steps who inly trode
The bright Castalian brink and Latinos' steep:--
Even such his life's cross-paths: till deathly deep
He toiled through sands of Lethe, etc.
I 'll say more anent Keats anon.

About the period of this portion of the correspondence (1880) I was
engaged reading up old periodicals dating from 1816 to 1822. My purpose
was to get at first-hand all available data relative to the life of
Keats. I thought I met with a good deal of fresh material, and as the
result of my reading I believed myself able to correct a few errors
as to facts into which previous writers on the subject had fallen. Two
things at least I realised--first, that Keats's poetic gift developed
very rapidly, more rapidly perhaps than that of Shelley; and, next, that
Keats received vastly more attention and appreciation in his day than is
commonly supposed. I found it was quite a blunder to say that the first
volume of miscellaneous poems fell flat. Lord Houghton says in error
that the book did not so much as seem to signal the advent of a new
Cockney poet! It is a fact, however, that this very book, in conjunction
with one of Shelley's and one of Hunt's, all published 1816-17, gave
rise to the name "The Cockney School of Poets," which was invented by
the writer signing "Z." in _Blackwood_ in the early part of 1818. Nor
had Keats to wait for the publication of the volume before attaining
to some poetic distinction. At the close of 1816, an article, under
the head of "Young Poets," appeared in _The Examiner_, and in this
both Shelley and Keats were dealt with. Then _The Quarterly_ contained
allusions to him, though not by name, in reviews of Leigh Hunt's work,
and _Blackwood_ mentioned him very frequently in all sorts of places as
"John