[63] Mrs Owen was the first of Keats’s critics to call attention to this passage, without, however, understanding the special significance it derives from the date of its composition.
[64] Houghton MSS.
[65] See below, [p. 193], note 2.
[66] “Interrupted,” says Brown oracularly in Houghton MSS., “by a circumstance which it is needless to mention.”
[67] This passing phrase of Brown, who lived with Keats in the closest daily companionship, by itself sufficiently refutes certain statements of Haydon. But see Appendix, [p. 232].
[68] A week or two later Leigh Hunt printed in the Indicator a few stanzas from the Cap and Bells, and about the same time dedicated to Keats his translation of Tasso’s Amyntas, speaking of the original as “an early work of a celebrated poet whose fate it was to be equally pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical.”
[69] See Crabb Robinson. Diaries, Vol. II. p. 197, etc.
[71] Houghton MSS. In both the Autobiography and the Correspondence the passage is amplified with painful and probably not trustworthy additions.
[72] I have the date of sailing from Lloyd’s, through the kindness of the secretary, Col. Hozier. For the particulars of the voyage and the time following it, I have drawn in almost equal degrees from the materials published by Lord Houghton, by Mr Forman, by Severn himself in Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI. p. 401, and from the unpublished Houghton and Severn MSS.