tically sublime." He goes on to say that he feels that he has no
identity of his own, but that he is a kind of sensitive mirror on which
external things imprint themselves for a lucid moment and are gone
again; he says that it is a torture to him to be in a room with other
people, because the identity of everyone presses on him so insistently.
He adds in a fine elation that "the faint conceptions that he has of
poems to come, bring the blood frequently into his forehead."

Such a letter as this admits one to the very penetralia of the
supremely artistic mind--but the wonder of Keats' confession is that he
saw himself as clearly and distinctly as he saw everyone else. And
further, I do not think that there is anything in literature that gives
one a sharper feeling of the reality of genius than to find the
immortal poems, such as _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, copied down in the
middle of a letter, as an unconsidered trifle which may amuse his
correspondent.

Now, in saying this, I do not for a moment say that Keats was an
entirely admirable or even a wholly lovable character--though his
tenderness, his consideration, his affectionateness constantly emerge.
He had strongly marked faults: his taste is often questionable; his
humour is frequently deplorable. He makes and repeats jokes which cause
one to writhe and blush--he was, and I say it boldly, occasionally
vulgar; but it is not an innate vulgarity, only the superficial
vulgarity which comes of living among second-rate suburban literary
people. One cannot help feeling every now and then that some of Keats'
friends were really impossible--but I am glad that _he_ did not feel
them to be so, that he was loyal and generous about them. There have
been great critics, of whom Matthew Arnold was one, who have said
frankly that the aroma of Keats' letters is intolerable. That does not
seem to me a large judgment, but it is quite an intelligible one. If
one has been brought up in a certain instinctive kind of refinement,
there are certain modes of life, certain ways of looking at things,
which grate hopelessly upon one's idea of what is refined; and perhaps
life is not long enough to try and overcome it, to try and argue
oneself out of it. I think it is quite possible that if one had only
known Keats slightly, one might have thought him a very underbred young
man, as when he showed himself suspicious and ill at ease in the
company of Shelley, because of his social standing. "A loo