innocent, childish thread of a dream woof of even more beautiful possibilities. Bailey's words are:

1 "He had a truly poetic feeling for women; and he often spoke to me of his sister, who was somehow withheld from him, with great delicacy and tenderness of affection."

The withholding was, in fact, only too true. Dull-witted Mr. Abbey had conceived the opinion that Keats was a bad influence for his sister. In Abbey's opinion, a man who could act as Keats had done, who could fling away his opportunity of becoming a member of a worthy and lucrative profession to follow the will-o'-the-wisp chances of poetry, was almost an abandoned character. He was too ignorant to know the reputations of the men whose society Keats frequented. Like many Britishers of the lower middle class during the last century, he shuddered at the name "artist," and experienced at the mere thought of men devoting their lives to such bagatelles as painting pictures or writing verses a kind of nameless fear. John was one of the crew, and therefore he was undoubtedly bad, if indeed, he were not mad; and it is probable that Abbey would have felt much easier in his mind could his recalcitrant ward have been proved hopelessly insane. That, at least would not have been blameworthy, or due to any error of his guardian's bringing up. Such intercourse as he allowed between Fanny and John was of the most meagre kind. But, at this period, he seems not to have objected to their exchanging letters, as he did later on.

In this first letter, Keats sets out his purpose clearly. It is that he and Fanny shall keep up a regular correspondence to make up, as far as may be, for the infrequence of their meetings. This is how he puts it:

"Let us now begin a regular question and answer — a little pro and con; letting it interfere as a pleasant method of my coming at your favourite little wants and enjoy1 Colvin.

ments, that I may meet them in a way befitting a brother. We have been so little together since you have been able to reflect on things that I know not whether you prefer the History of King Pepin to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress - or Cinderella and her glass slipper to Moor's Almanack. However in a few letters I hope I shall be able to come at that and adapt my scribblings to your Pleasure. You must tell me about all you read if it be only six Pages in a Week and this transmitted to me every now and then will procure you full sheets of Writing from me pretty frequently. This I feel as a necessity for we ought to become intimately acquainted, in order that I may not only, as you grow up love you as my only Sister, but confide in you as my dearest friend."

The wistfulness of Keats's suggestion is pathetic. Here again is the old story: that longing for a woman in whom he can confide; that need of a sister, one of the great, compelling needs of his life. Fanny is too young still, as he realizes (she was only fourteen), but he seeks to build up such a relation between them that, by the time she has developed to the point of understanding him, she will unconsciously have stepped into the empty place in his heart and be quite ready to function toward him in the capacity he so much desires. Now, at Oxford, this sisterneed is imperious, and Fanny, just growing old enough to talk to about some things, at any rate is very much in his mind.

Toward the end of the letter, he comes back to his charge: and write all you

"Now Fanny you must write soon think about, never mind what only let me have a good deal of your writing."

Fanny must have obeyed, for the "full sheets of writing" which he promises to send her "pretty frequently" in answer, she certainly got. The letters are constant with inquiries as to what she would like him to send her books, pencils, drawing-paper, plants, even the advisability

of a flageolet is discussed. He lets his fun run over in these letters, they fairly ripple with enchanting nonsense, and are full of a solicitous tenderness for the little girl and every small thing about her life.

Here I must abandon chronology for a moment and give a few excerpts from these letters to Fanny. They reveal a certain side of Keats as nothing else does, and without this side no portrait of him is complete. Keats regarded the Abbeys as a sort of ogres, and Fanny does not seem to have been happy with them. This Oxford letter is addressed to her at "Miss Kaley's School," which looks as though Keats preferred not to send his letters to Mr. Abbey's house. As the school was in Walthamstow, where Abbey lived, this method of address, even if Fanny were a boarder, seems odd without some such explanation.

Keats may not have cared for children in general, but he cared very much for Fanny, and he knew perfectly how to please her. In one of these letters he asks her a profoundly important question, as follows:

"On looking at your seal I cannot tell whether it is done or not with a Tassie- it seems to me to be paste. As I went through Leicester Square lately I was going to call and buy you some, but not knowing but you might have some I would not run the chance of buying duplicates. Tell me if you have any or if you would like any — and whether you would rather have motto ones like that with which I seal this letter; or heads of great Men such as Shakespeare, Milton, &c. - or fancy pieces of Art; such as Fame, Adonis &c. - those gentry you read of at the end of the English Dictionary."

Keats often speaks of seals, and, as I have already mentioned,1 he had a great affection for these Tassie "gems." There was a wide range for him to choose from, since the Tassie reproductions ran into thousands of specimens. Those letters of Keats which I have, in which

1 See Vol. I, p. 115.

the seal impressions are not obliterated, show five different designs; there is a head of Shakespeare, two large heads of worthy gentlemen I cannot identify, a small square containing the torso of a boy, and a beautiful little lyre with two of its strings broken and the rather wistful motto: "Qui me néglige me désole." 1

Whatever goes to the making of an interesting man is interesting, therefore I feel no scruple for bringing in the seals, nor this most engaging bit in another letter to Fanny, written after waiting for a stage-coach to start:

"I got to the stage half an hour before it set out and counted the buns and tarts in a Pastry-cook's window and was just beginning with the Jellies."

There the sentence ends and leaves us with our mouths watering.

One more quotation from these letters to his sister, I must give. Its quaintness and charm are, I think, irresistible. It is one of the best examples of this vein in Keats. He is writing from Winchester on an August day:

-

"I should like now to promenade round your Gardens apple-tasting — pear-tasting — plum-judging apricot nibbling-peach-scrunching — nectarine-sucking and Melon-carving. I have also a great feeling for antiquated cherries full of sugar cracks and a white currant tree kept for company. I admire lolling on a lawn by a water lillied pond to eat white currants and see gold fish: and go to the Fair in the Evening if I'm good. There is not hope for that one is sure to get into some mess before

evening."

After all this whimsey, comes the loving solicitude after Fanny's welfare, for the letter ends:

"Have these hot days I brag of so much been well or ill for your health? Let me hear soon —”

1 See drawing on title-page.

This pursuit of Keats's attitude toward his sister has taken us far afield from Oxford. I propose to scramble back forthwith, by giving Bailey's account of the manner in which the two friends spent their days.1 Says Bailey:

"He wrote, and I read, sometimes at the same table, sometimes at separate desks or tables, from breakfast to the time of our going out for exercize, three o'clock. He sat down to his task,

generally two or which was about

50 lines a day, with his paper before him, and wrote with as much regularity, and apparently as much ease as he wrote his letters... Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but not often: and he would make it up another day. But he never forced himself. When he had finished his writing for the day, he usually read it over to me: and he read or wrote letters until we went for a walk. This was our habit day by day."

We can supplement this meagre outline from a sketch in a letter written by Keats to Reynolds on September twenty-first. It is a far more brightly coloured picture:

"For these last five or six days, we have had a Boat on the Isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your eye-lashes. We sometimes skim into a Bed of rushes, and there become naturalized river-folks, - there is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened 'Reynolds's Cove,' in which we have read Wordsworth, and talked as may be."

Bailey seems to have been under the impression (which, after all, is not likely to be very accurate, as he was writing thirty years later) that Keats wrote a great many letters while he was at Oxford. If he did so, few of them have descended to us. Two letters to Jane Reynolds, one to Jane and Marianne together, two to their brother, one to Fanny Keats, and one to Haydon, are all we have from Oxford, and, of these, one is a new discovery. In the last chapter,

1 Bailey Memoranda. Colvin.