earlier days are gone by; I find that I can have no enjoyment in
the world but continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no
worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some
do it with their society, some with their wit, some with their
benevolence, some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and
good humour on all they meet--and in a thousand ways, all dutiful
to the command of great Nature. There is but one way for me: the
road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue
it; and for that end purpose retiring for some years. I have been
hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the
luxurious and a love for philosophy. Were I calculated for the
former, I should be glad; but, as I am not, I shall turn all my
soul to the latter."

This "exquisite sense of the luxurious" must have prompted an
interjection of Keats in a rather earlier letter to Bailey (November
1817): "Oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!"

One does not usually associate the suspicious character with the
unselfish and generous character. Even apart from Haydon's, there is
ample evidence to show that Keats was generous, and, in a sense,
unselfish; although a man of creative or productive genius, intent upon
his own work, and subordinating everything else to it, is seldom
unselfish in the fullest ordinary sense of the term. But he was
certainly suspicious. Of this temper we have already seen some painful
ebullitions in his letters to Fanny Brawne. These might be ascribed
mainly to the acute feelings of a lover, the morbid impressions of an
invalid. But, in truth, Keats always was and had been suspicious. In a
letter to his brothers, dated in January 1818, he refers, in a tone of
some soreness, to objections which Hunt had raised against points of
treatment in the first Book of "Endymion," adding: "The fact is, he and
Shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the
affair officiously; and, from several hints I have had, they appear much
disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip I may have made."
Still earlier, writing to Haydon, he had confessed to "a horrid
morbidity of temperament." In a letter of June 1818 to Bailey he says:
"You have all your life (I think so) believed everybody: I have
suspected everybody." By January 1820 he has got into a condition of
decided _ennui_, not far removed from misanthropy, and the compa