Well Walk, September 1st [1818].
My dear Jane—Certainly your kind note would rather refresh than trouble me, and so much the more would your coming if as you say, it could be done without agitating my Brother too much. Receive on your Hearth our deepest thanks for your Solicitude concerning us.
I am glad John is not hurt, but gone safe into Devonshire—I shall be in great expectation of his Letter—but the promise of it in so anxious and friendly a way I prize more than a hundred. I shall be in town to-day on some business with my guardian “as was” with scarce a hope of being able to call on you. For these two last days Tom has been more cheerful: you shall hear again soon how he will be.
Remember us particularly to your Mother.
Your sincere friend
John Keats.
LXIX.—TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE.
[Hampstead, September 21 1818.]
My dear Dilke—According to the Wentworth place Bulletin you have left Brighton much improved: therefore now a few lines will be more of a pleasure than a bore. I have things to say to you, and would fain begin upon them in this fourth line: but I have a Mind too well regulated to proceed upon anything without due preliminary remarks.—You may perhaps have observed that in the simple process of eating radishes I never begin at the root but constantly dip the little green head in the salt—that in the Game of Whist if I have an ace I constantly play it first. So how can I with any face begin without a dissertation on letter-writing? Yet when I consider that a sheet of paper contains room only for three pages and a half, how can I do justice to such a pregnant subject? However, as you have seen the history of the world stamped as it were by a diminishing glass in the form of a chronological Map, so will I “with retractile claws” draw this into the form of a table—whereby it will occupy merely the remainder of this first page—