Ocean
His tributary streams, pools numberless,

and the transcript may have been carelessly made, but having got his line
right in his first draft, Keats probably did not spoil it in his second.
The Athenaeum version inserts a comma after art in the last line, which
seems to me a decided improvement, and eminently characteristic of
Keats's method. I am glad to see that Mr. Buxton Forman has adopted it.

As for the corrections that Lord Houghton's version shows Keats to have
made in the eighth and ninth lines of this sonnet, it is evident that
they sprang from Keats's reluctance to repeat the same word in
consecutive lines, except in cases where a word's music or meaning was to
be emphasised. The substitution of 'its' for 'his' in the sixth line is
more difficult of explanation. It was due probably to a desire on
Keats's part not to mar by any echo the fine personification of Hesperus.

It may be noticed that Keats's own eyes were brown, and not blue, as
stated by Mrs. Proctor to Lord Houghton. Mrs. Speed showed me a note to
that effect written by Mrs. George Keats on the margin of the page in
Lord Houghton's Life (p. 100, vol. i.), where Mrs. Proctor's description
is given. Cowden Clarke made a similar correction in his Recollections,
and in some of the later editions of Lord Houghton's book the word 'blue'
is struck out. In Severn's portraits of Keats also the eyes are given as
brown.

The exquisite sense of colour expressed in the ninth and tenth lines may
be paralleled by

The Ocean with its vastness, its blue green,