As hath the seeded thistle when a parle
It holds with Zephyr ere it sendeth fair
Its light balloons into the summer air.
Thereto his beard had not begun to bloom;
No brush had touched his chin, or razor sheer;
No care had touched his cheek with mortal doom,
But new he was and bright as scarf from Persian loom.

"Ne cared he for wine or half-and-half,
Ne cared he for fish or flesh or fowl,
And sauces held he worthless as the chaff;
He 'sdained the swine-head at the wassail bowl.
Ne with lewd ribalds sat he cheek by jowl,
Ne with sly lemans in the scorner's chair;
But after water-brooks this pilgrim's soul
Panted, and all his food was woodland air,
Though he would oft-times feast on gillyflowers rare.

"The slang of cities in no wise he knew;
'Tipping the wink' to him was heathen Greek.
He sipped no olden Tom or ruin blue,
Or Nantz or cherry-brandy, drank full meek
By many a damsel brave and rouge of cheek.
Nor did he know each aged watchman's beat;
Nor in obscured purlieus would he seek
For curled Jewesses with ankles neat,
Who, as they walk abroad, make tinkling with their feet."

Mr. Brown, son of a London stockbroker from Scotland, was a man several
years older than Keats, born in 1786. He was a Russia merchant retired
from business, of much culture and instinctive sympathy with genius, and
he enjoyed assisting the efforts of young men of promise. He had
produced the libretto of an opera, "Narensky," and he eventually
published a book on the Sonnets of Shakespeare. From the date we have
now reached, the summer of 1818, which was more than a year following
their first introduction, Brown may be regarded as the most intimate of
all Keats's friends, Dilke coming next to him.

The pedestrian tour with Brown was the sequel of a family leave-taking
at Liverpool. George Keats, finding in himself no vocation for trade,
with its smug compliances and sleek assiduities (and John agreed with
him in these views), had determined to emigrate to America, and rough it
in a new settlement for a living, perhaps for fortune; and, as a
preliminary step, he had married Miss Georgiana Augusta Wylie, a girl of
sixteen, daughter of a deceased naval officer. The sonnet "Nymph of the
downward smile" &c. was addressed to her. John Keats