written a
letter complaining of illness--gravel, caused by some lime-tainted water
on the premises. But the success depended upon a very singular
coincidence, viz., that by mere chance Keats had happened to give the
tenant's name correctly. The angry reply of Brown to the angry
supposititious letter of Benjamin, and the astonishment of Benjamin upon
receiving Brown's retort, are fertile of laughter.

Keats does not appear to have ever made any pretence to defined
religious belief of any sort, nor seriously to have debated the subject,
or troubled his mind about it one way or the other. He was certainly not
a Christian. His early friend, Mr. Felton Mathew, speaks of him as "of
the sceptical and republican school." On Christmas Eve, 1816, soon after
he had come of age, he wrote the following sonnet--

"The church-bells toll a melancholy round,
Calling the people to some other prayers,
Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound.
Surely the mind of man is closely bound
In some black spell: seeing that each one tears
Himself from fireside joys and Lydian airs,
And converse high of those with glory crowned.

Still, still they toll: and I should feel a damp,
A chill as from a tomb, did I not know
That they are dying like an outburnt lamp,--
That 'tis their sighing, wailing, ere they go
Into oblivion,--that fresh flowers will grow,
And many glories of immortal stamp."

His sonnet on Ben Nevis, 1818, is also an utterance of
scepticism--speaking of heaven and hell as misty surmises, and of "the
world of thought and mental might" as a realm of nebulosity. A letter to
Leigh Hunt, May 1817, contains a phrase arraigning the God of
Christians. To the clerical student Bailey, September 1818, he spoke
out: "You know my ideas about religion. I do not think myself more in
the right than other people, that nothing in this world is proveable."
The latter clause appears to be carelessly elliptical in expression, the
real meaning being "I think [not "I do _not_ think"] that nothing in
this world is proveable." To Fanny Brawne, towards May 1820, he appealed
"by the blood of that Christ you believe in." Haydon tells a noticeable
anecdote--the only one, I think, which exhibits Keats as an admirer of
that anti-imaginative order of intellect of which Voltaire was a
prototype--

"He had a tending to religion when first I kne