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 affectation, to reveal--his loftiest hopes
and aspirations, the wide remote prospects seen from the hills of life,
the deep ambitions, the exaltations of spirit, the raptures of art. I
do not mean that one can share these in their fulness; but Keats seems
to have experienced daily and hourly, in his best days, those august
shocks of experience and insight of which any man who loves and
worships art, however fitfully, can register a few. There is a little
picture of Keats, done, I think, after his death by Severn, which
represents him sitting in the tiny parlour of Wentworth Place, with the
window open to the orchard, where, under the plum-tree, he wrote the
_Ode to the Nightingale_.
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