greatest
affection on every flower I have known from my infancy--their shapes
and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a
superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most
thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign
flowers in hot-houses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a
straw for them. The simple flowers of our spring are what I want to see
again." Music was another of his great enjoyments. He would sit for
hours while Miss Charlotte Reynolds played to him on the pianoforte; and
a wrong note in an orchestra has been known to rouse his pugnacity, and
make him wish to "go down and smash all the fiddles." Haydn's symphonies
were among his prime favourites, and Purcell's songs from Shakespeare.
"Give me," he wrote from Winchester to his sister, in August 1819,
"books, fruit, French wine, and fine weather, and a little music out of
doors, played by somebody I do not know, and I can pass a summer very
quietly." He would also listen long to Severn's playing, following the
air with a low kind of recitative; and could himself "produce a pleasing
musical effect, though possessing hardly any voice."

Closely though he was mixed up with Leigh Hunt and his circle, Keats
had, in fact, not much sympathy with their ideas on literary topics, nor
with Hunt's own poetry, still less with their views on political matters
of the time, in which he took but very faint interest. Cowden Clarke
thought that the poet's "whole civil creed was comprised in the
master-principle of universal liberty, viz., equal and stern justice to
all, from the duke to the dustman." He was, however, a liberal by
temperament, and, I suppose, by conviction as well. One of the really
puerile and nonsensical passages in "Endymion" is that which opens book
iii. He told his friend Richard Woodhouse (a barrister, connected with
the firm of Taylor and Hessey) that it expressed his opinion of the Tory
Ministry then in office:--

"There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel; who unpen
Their baaing vanities to browse away
The comfortable green and juicy hay
From human pastures; or, oh torturing fact!
Who through an idiot blink will see unpacked
Fire-branded foxes to scar up and singe
Our gold and ripe-eared hopes. With not one tinge
Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight
Able to face an owl's, they still are dight
By the b