Hunt invited Keats to visit him. Of this first meeting between the two men, Clarke wrote:
“That was a red letter day in the young poet’s life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts. The character and expression of Keats’s features would arrest even the casual passenger in the street; and now they were wrought to a tone of animation that I could not but watch with interest, knowing what was in store for him from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention, with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to encounter and receive.... The interview, which stretched into three ‘morning calls’, was the prelude to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its neighborhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed.”[92]
Hunt’s account of the meeting is as follows:
“I shall never forget the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet’s heart as warm as his imagination. We read and we walked together, and used to write verse of an evening upon a given subject. No imaginative pleasure was left untouched by us, or unenjoyed; from the recollections of the bards and patriots of old, to the luxury of a summer rain at our window, or the clicking of the coal in the winter-time. Not long afterwards, having the pleasure of entertaining at dinner Mr. Godwin, Mr. Hazlitt, and Mr. Basil Montagu, I showed the verses of my young friend, and they were pronounced to be as extraordinary as I thought them.”[93]
Leigh Hunt discovered Keats, by no means a small thing, for as he himself has said: “To admire and comment upon the genius that two or three hundred years have applauded, and to discover what will partake of applause two or three hundred years hence, are processes of a very different description.”[94] With the same power of prophetic discernment, writing in 1828, he realized to the full the greatness of Keats and predicted that growth of his fame in the future which has since taken place.[95] Keats’s account of his reception is given in the sonnet Keen fitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there:
“For I am brimfull of the friendliness
That in a little cottage I have found;
Of fair hair’d Milton’s eloquent distress,
And all his love for gentle Lycid drown’d;
Of lovely Laura in her light green dress,
And faithful Petrarch gloriously crowned.”
The date of the introduction of Keats to Hunt has been placed variously from November, 1815, to the end of the year 1816. He says:
“It was not at Hampstead that I first saw Keats. It was in York Buildings, in the New Road (No. 8), where I wrote part of the Indicator—and he resided with me while in Mortimer Terrace, Kentish Town (No. 13), where I concluded it. I mention this for the curious in such things, among whom I am one.”[96]
If this statement were correct, it would make the meeting about two or three years later than has generally been supposed, for Leigh Hunt did not move to York Buildings until 1818, and he did not begin work on the Indicator until October, 1819. Clarke states positively that the meeting took place at Hampstead. From this evidence Mr. Colvin has suggested the early spring of 1816 as the most probable date.[97] What seems better evidence than any that has yet been brought forward is a passage in The Examiner of June 1, 1817, in Hunt’s review of Keats’s Poems of 1817, where he says that the poet is a personal friend whom he announced to the public a short time ago (this allusion can only be to an article in The Examiner of December 1, 1816) and that the friendship dates from “no greater distance of time than the announcement above mentioned. We had published one of his sonnets in our paper,[98] without knowing more of him than of any other anonymous correspondent; but at the period in question a friend brought us one morning some copies in verse, which he said were from the pen of a youth.... We had not read more than a dozen lines when we recognized a young poet indeed.” This seems conclusive evidence that the meeting did not take place until the winter of 1816, for Hunt’s testimony written in 1817, when the circumstance was fresh in his mind is certainly more trustworthy than his impression of it at the time that he revised his Autobiography in 1859 at the age of seventy-five years.
The two men, before they came in contact, had much in common, and Hunt’s influence, while in some cases an inspiring force, more often fostered instincts already existing in Keats. Both possessed by nature a deep love of poetry, color and melody, and both “were given to ‘luxuriating’ somewhat voluptuously over the ‘deliciousness’ of the beautiful in art, books or nature.”[99] At the very beginning of their acquaintance, notwithstanding a disparity in age of eleven years, they were wonderfully drawn to each other. Spenser was their favorite poet. Both had a great love for Chaucer, for Oriental fable and for Chivalric romance, and an unusual knowledge of Greek myth. But even at the height of their intimacy, the friendship seems to have remained more intellectual than personal, a fact due no doubt to Keats’s reserve and Hunt’s “incuriousness.”[100] Except for this drawback Hunt considered the friendship ideal. He says: “Mr. Keats and I were old friends of the old stamp, between whom there was no such thing as obligation, except the pleasure of it. He enjoyed the privilege of greatness with all whom he knew, rendering it delightful to be obliged by him, and an equal, but not a greater delight, to oblige. It was a pleasure to his friends to have him in their houses, and he did not grude it.”[101]