[1] Macmillan’s Magazine, August 1888.
[2] For the letters already printed by Lord Houghton, Mr. Forman as a rule simply copied the text of that editor. The letters to Fanny Brawne and Fanny Keats, on the other hand, he printed with great accuracy from the autographs, and had autographs also before him in revising those to Dilke, Haydon, and several besides. The correspondence with Fanny Keats he kindly gave me leave to use for the present volume, receiving from me in return the right to use my MS. materials for a revised issue of his own work. In that issue, which appeared at the end of 1889, the new matter is, however, printed separately, in the form of scraps and addenda detached from their context; and the present edition (the appearance of which has been delayed for two years by accidental circumstances) is the only one in which the true text of the American and miscellaneous letters is given consecutively and in proper order.
[3] The letters in which I have relied wholly or in part on Mr. Speed’s text are Nos. xxv. lxxx. (only for a few passages missing in the autograph) cxvi. and cxxxi.
[4] Where the dates in my text are printed without brackets, they are those given by Keats himself; the dates within brackets have been supplied either from the postmarks (as was done by Woodhouse in all his transcripts) or by inference from the text.
[5] The autographs of these letters, all except three, are now in the British Museum.
[6] The early letters of Keats are full of these Shakspearean tags and allusions: some of the less familiar I have thought it worth while to mark in the footnotes.
[7] The references are of course to Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, and Haydon. In the sonnet as printed in the Poems of 1817, and all later editions, the last line but one breaks off at “workings,” the words “in the human mart” having been omitted by Haydon’s advice.
[8] Presumably as shown in some drawing or miniature.
[9] Not the long poem published under that title in 1818, but the earlier attempt beginning, “I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,” which was printed as a fragment in the Poems of 1817.
[10] This letter, which is marked by Woodhouse in his copy “no date, sent by hand,” I take to be an answer to the commendatory sonnet addressed by Reynolds to Keats on February 27, 1817: see Keats (Men of Letters Series), Appendix, p. 223.