And all its vassal streams: pools numberless
May rage, and foam, and fret, but never can
Subside if not to dark-blue nativeness.
Blue! gentle cousin of the forest green,
Married to green in all the sweetest flowers,
Forget-me-not,--the blue-bell,--and, that queen
Of secrecy, the violet: what strange powers
Hast thou, as a mere shadow! But how great,
When in an Eye thou art alive with fate!

Feb. 1818.

In the Athenaeum of the 3rd of June 1876, appeared a letter from Mr. A.
J. Horwood, stating that he had in his possession a copy of The Garden of
Florence in which this sonnet was transcribed. Mr. Horwood, who was
unaware that the sonnet had been already published by Lord Houghton,
gives the transcript at length. His version reads hue for life in the
first line, and bright for wide in the second, and gives the sixth line
thus:

With all his tributary streams, pools numberless,

a foot too long: it also reads to for of in the ninth line. Mr. Buxton
Forman is of opinion that these variations are decidedly genuine, but
indicative of an earlier state of the poem than that adopted in Lord
Houghton's edition. However, now that we have before us Keats's first
draft of his sonnet, it is difficult to believe that the sixth line in
Mr. Horwood's version is really a genuine variation. Keats may have
written,