inconstancy of the mind to the poets whom it once worshipped.
Southey is as hale as ever, and writes with his usual diligence.
Old Gifford is still alive, in the extremity of age, and with most
pitiable decay of what little sharp and narrow intellect the Devil
had gifted him withal. One hates to allow such a man the privilege
of growing old and infirm. It takes away our speculative license of
kicking him.

Keats? No; I have not seen him except across a crowded street, with
coaches, drays, horsemen, cabs, omnibuses, foot-passengers, and
divers other sensual obstructions intervening betwixt his small and
slender figure and my eager glance. I would fain have met him on
the sea-shore, or beneath a natural arch of forest trees, or the
Gothic arch of an old cathedral, or among Grecian ruins, or at a
glimmering fireside on the verge of evening, or at the twilight
entrance of a cave, into the dreamy depths of which he would have
led me by the hand; anywhere, in short, save at Temple Bar, where
his presence was blotted out by the porter-swollen bulks of these
gross Englishmen. I stood and watched him fading away, fading away
along the pavement, and could hardly tell whether he were an actual
man or a thought that had slipped out of my mind and clothed itself
in human form and habiliments merely to beguile me. At one moment
he put his handkerchief to his lips, and withdrew it, I am almost
certain, stained with blood. You never saw anything so fragile as
his person. The truth is, Keats has all his life felt the effects
of that terrible bleeding at the lungs caused by the article on his
Endymion in the Quarterly Review, and which so nearly brought him to
the grave. Ever since he has glided about the world like a ghost,
sighing a melancholy tone in the ear of here and there a friend, but
never sending forth his voice to greet the multitude. I can hardly