A Day with Keats

Made and Printed in Great Britain for Hodder & Stoughton, Limited, by C. Tinling & Co., Ltd., Liverpool, London and Prescot.
About eight o'clock one morning in early summer, a young man may be seen sauntering to and fro in the garden of Wentworth Place, Hampstead. Wentworth Place consists of two houses only; in the first, John Keats is established along with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. The second is inhabited by a Mrs. Brawne and her family. They are wooden houses, with festooning draperies of foliage: and the clean countrified air of Hampstead comes with sweet freshness through the gardens, and fills the young man with ecstatic delight. He gazes around him, with his weak dark eyes, upon the sky, the flowers, the various minutiæ of nature which mean so much to him: and although he has severely tried a never robust physique by sitting up half the night in study, a new exhilaration now throbs through his veins. For, in his own words, he loves the principle of beauty in all things: and he repeats to himself, as he loiters up and down in the sunshine, the lines into which he has crystallized, for all time, sensations similar to those of the present:—
Yet John Keats is in some respects out of keeping with the magnificent phraseology of which he is the mouthpiece. Little Keats, as his fellow medical students termed him, is a small, undersized man, not over five feet high—the shoulders too broad, the legs too spare— death in his hand, as Coleridge said, the slack moist hand of the incipient consumptive. The only thing of beauty about him is his face. It is a face, to quote his friend Leigh Hunt, in which energy and sensibility (i.e., sensitiveness) are remarkably mixed up—an eager power, wrecked and made impatient by ill-health. Every feature at once strongly cut and delicately alive. There is that femininity in the cast of his features, which Coleridge classed as an attribute of true genius. His beautiful brown hair falls loosely over those eyes, large, dark, glowing, which appeal to all observers by their mystical illumination of rapture—eyes which seem as though they had been dwelling on some glorious sight—which have, as Haydon said, an inward look perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions.