se, slack,
ill-dressed youth," was Coleridge's impression of Keats, when he met
him in a lane near Highgate. But I honestly believe that this would
have been only an external and superficial feeling. Again, Keats as a
lover is undeniably disconcerting. His zealousness, his uncontrolled
luxuriance of passion, though partly attributable to his fevered and
despondent condition of health, are lacking in dignity. But as a
friend, Keats seems to me almost above praise; and I can imagine that
if one had been of his circle, and had won his regard, it would have
been difficult not to have idealised him. He seems to me to have
displayed that frank, affectionate brotherliness, untainted by
sentimentality, which is the essence of equal friendship; and then,
too, he gave his heart and his thoughts and his dreams to his friends
so prodigally and lavishly--not egotistically, as some have given--with
no self-absorption, no lack of sympathy, but in the spirit of the old
fisherman in Theocritus, who says to his comrade, "Come, be a sharer of
my dreams as of my fishing," and then tells his pretty vision. With no
lack of sympathy, I say, because the lavish generosity with which Keats
bestowed his money upon his friends, when he had but a small store left
and when financial difficulties were staring him in the face, is one of
the finest things about him. There is a correspondence with that
strange, selfish spendthrift Haydon, which shows the endless trouble
Keats would take to raise money for a friend when he was in worse
straits himself. Haydon treated him with insolent frankness, and hinted
that Keats was parsimonious and ungenerous; even so, Keats never lost
his temper, but described with perfect simplicity the extraordinary
difficulties he was himself involved in, with as much patience and
good-humour as though he had been himself the borrower; and the
delicious letters that he wrote, all through his own anxieties, to his
little sister Fanny, then a girl at a boarding-school, reveal, like
nothing else, the faithful and-tender spirit of the boy--for he was
hardly more than a boy. Of course there are letters, like those of Lamb
and FitzGerald, which bring one very close to the spirit of the writer;
but with this difference, that they rarely seem to lay bare their
inmost thought; but Keats had no reserve with his best friends. He put
into words the very things that we most of us are ashamed, from a fear
of being accused of pose and affectat