se, as to his own chief sorrow. A stranger intermeddles not with
it, and he kept secret his brief lay on that insuperable and
incommunicable regret. Much would have been lost had all poets been as
reticent, yet one likes him better for it than if he had given us a new
"Vita Nuova."

What an immense long way I have wandered from "Sordello," my dear
Mainwaring, but when a man turns to his books, his thoughts, like those
of a boy, "are long, long thoughts." I have not written on Longfellow's
sonnets, for even you, impeccable sonneteer, admit that you admire them
as much as I do.

A FRIEND OF KEATS

_To Thomas Egerton, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford_.

Dear Egerton,--Yes, as you say, Mr. Sidney Colvin's new "Life of Keats"
{3} has only one fault, it's too short. Perhaps, also, it is almost too
studiously free from enthusiasm. But when one considers how Keats (like
Shelley) has been gushed about, and how easy it is to gush about Keats,
one can only thank Mr. Colvin for his example of reserve. What a good
fellow Keats was! How really manly and, in the best sense, moral he
seems, when one compares his life and his letters with the vagaries of
contemporary poets who lived longer than he, though they, too, died
young, and who left more work, though not better, never so good, perhaps,
as Keats's best.

However, it was not of Keats that I wished to write, but of his friend,
John Hamilton Reynolds. _Noscitur a sociis_--a man is known by the
company he keeps. Reynolds, I think, must have been excellent company,
if we may judge him by his writings. He comes into Lord Houghton's "Life
and Letters of Keats" very early (vol. i. p. 30). We find the poet
writing to him in the April of 1817, from the Isle of Wight. "I shall
forthwith begin my 'Endymion,' which I hope I shall have got some way
with before you come, when we will read our verses in a delightful place
I have set my heart upon, near the castle." Keats ends "your sincere
friend," and a man to whom Keats was a sincere friend had some occasion
for pride.

About Reynolds's life neither time nor space permits me to say very much,
if I knew very much, which I don't. He was the son of a master in one of
our large schools. He went to the Bar. He married a sister of Thomas
Hood. He wrote, like Hood, in the _London Magazine_. With Hood for
ally, he published "Odes and Addresses to Great People;" the third
edition, which I have here, is of 1826. The late r