may take
this point of view. The friendships of men are a vastly more
interesting and poetic study than the friendships of men and women.
This is in the nature of the case. It is the usual victory of the
normal over the abnormal. As a rule, it is impossible for a friendship
to exist between a man and woman, unless the man and woman in question
be husband and wife. Then it is as rare as it is beautiful. And with
men, the most admirable spectacle is not always that where attendant
circumstances prompt to heroic display of friendship, for it is often
so much easier to die than to live. But you may see young men pledging
their mutual love and support in this difficult and adventurous quest
of what is noblest in the art of living. Such love will not urge to a
theatrical posing, and it can hardly find expression in words. Words
seem to profane it. I do not say that Keats stood in such an ideal
relation to any one of his many friends whose names appear in the
letters. He gave of himself to them all, and he received much from
each. No man of taste and genius could have been other than flattered
by the way in which Keats approached him. He was charming in his
attitude toward Haydon; and when Haydon proposed sending Keats's
sonnet to Wordsworth, the young poet wrote, 'The Idea of your sending
it to Wordsworth put me out of breath--you know with what Reverence I
would send my well wishes to him.'

But interesting as a chapter on Keats's friendships with men would be,
we are bound to confess that in dramatic intensity it would grow pale
when laid beside that fiery love passage of his life, his acquaintance
with Fanny Brawne. The thirty-nine letters given in the fourth volume
of Buxton Forman's edition of _Keats's Works_ tell the story of this
affair of a poet's heart. These are the letters which Mr. William
Watson says he has never read, and at which no consideration shall
ever induce him to look. But Mr. Watson reflects upon people who have
been human enough to read them when he compares such a proceeding on
his own part (were he able to be guilty of it) to the indelicacy of
'listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall.' This is not a just
illustration. The man who takes upon himself the responsibility of
being the first to open such intimate letters, and adds thereto the
infinitely greater responsibility of publishing them in so attractive
a form that he who runs will stop running in order to read,--such an
editor will need to