in ingredient in his passion, in all but its earliest stages.
I shall here extract these two passages, for both of them are of
exceptional importance for our biography--one as acquainting us with
Keats's general range of feeling in relation to women, and the other as
introducing the most serious and absorbing sentiment of the last two
years of his life. On October 29, 1818, he wrote as follows to his
brother George and his wife in America:--

"The Misses Reynolds are very kind to me.... On my return, the
first day I called [this was probably towards the 20th of
September], they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a
cousin of theirs, Miss Cox, who, having fallen out with her
grandpapa in a serious manner, was invited by Mrs. Reynolds to
take asylum in her house. She is an East Indian, and ought to be
her grandfather's heir.... From what I hear she is not without
faults of a real kind; but she has others which are more apt to
make women of inferior claims hate her. She is not a Cleopatra,
but is at least a Charmian; she has a rich Eastern look; she has
fine eyes and fine manners. When she comes into the room she
makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is
too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may
address her; from habit she thinks that nothing particular. I
always find myself more at ease with such a woman; the picture
before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot
possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such times too much
occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble; I forget
myself entirely, because I live in her. You will by this time
think I am in love with her; so, before I go any further, I will
tell you I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of
Mozart's might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an
amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation
with an imperial woman, the very yes and no of whose lips[4] is
to me a banquet. I don't cry to take the moon home with me in my
pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like her, and her
like, because one has no _sensations_; what we both are is taken
for granted. You will suppose I have by this time had much talk
with her. No such thing; there are the Misses Reynolds on the
look out. They think I don't admire her because I don't stare at
her; they call her a flirt to