knew you, and now one
of the first pleasures I look to is your happy marriage." Reynolds was
urging Keats to publish the "Pot of Basil" "as an answer to the attack
made on me in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_."

Next Keats writes that he himself "never was in love, yet the voice and
shape of a woman has haunted me these two days." On September 22, 1819,
Keats sent Reynolds the "Ode to Autumn," than which there is no more
perfect poem in the language of Shakespeare. This was the last of his
published letters to Reynolds. He was dying, haunted eternally by that
woman's shape and voice.

Reynolds's best-known book, if any of them can be said to be known at
all, was published under the name of John Hamilton. It is "The Garden of
Florence, and Other Poems" (Warren, London, 1821). There is a
dedication--to his young wife.

"Thou hast entreated me to 'write no more,'" and he, as an elderly "man
of twenty-four," promises to obey. "The lily and myself henceforth are
_two_," he says, implying that he and the lily have previously been
"one," a quaint confession from the poet of Peter Corcoran. There is
something very pleasant in the graceful regret and obedience of this
farewell to the Muse. He says to Mrs. Reynolds:

"I will not tell the world that thou hast chid
My heart for worshipping the idol Muse;
That thy dark eye has given its gentle lid
Tears for my wanderings; I may not choose
When thou dost speak but do as I am bid,--
And therefore to the roses and the dews,
Very respectfully I make my bow;--
And turn my back upon the tulips now."

"The chief poems in the collection, taken from Boccaccio, were to have
been associated with tales from the same source, intended to have been
written by a friend; but illness on his part and distracting engagements
on mine, prevented us from accomplishing our plan at the time; and Death
now, to my deep sorrow, has frustrated it for ever!"

I cannot but quote what follows, the tribute to Keats's kindness, to the
most endearing quality our nature possesses; the quality that was Scott's
in such a winning degree, that was so marked in Moliere,

"He, who is gone, was one of the very kindest friends I ever possessed,
and yet he was not kinder, perhaps, to me than to others. His intense
mind and powerful feeling would, I truly believe, have done the world
some service had his life been spared--but he was of too sensitive a
natu