1816, opens with a reference
to "many a dreary hour" which John Keats has passed, fearing he would
never be able to write good poetry, however much he might gaze on sky,
honey-bees, and the beauty of woman. The "Epistle to Clarke," September
1816, pays ample tribute to the guidance which he had afforded to Keats
into the realms of poetry, and contains a couplet which has of late been
very often quoted--

"Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly
Up to its climax, and then dying proudly?"

The sonnet--

"O Solitude, if I must with thee dwell,"

is the first thing that Keats ever published. It had previously appeared
in _The Examiner_ for May 5, 1816, and is clearly one of the best of
these early sonnets. The sonnet which begins with the unmetrical line--

"How many bards gild the lapses of time"

was included in the very first batch of verses by Keats which Cowden
Clarke showed to Leigh Hunt. Hunt expressed "unhesitating and prompt
admiration" of some other one among the compositions; and Horace Smith,
who was present, reading out the sonnet now before us, praised as "a
well-condensed expression" the contorted and inefficient line--

"That distance of recognizance bereaves,"

_i.e._ [sounds] which distance bereaves of recognizance, or, in plain
English, which are too distant to be recognized. Two other sonnets are
addressed to Haydon in a tone of glowing laudation.

"Sleep and Poetry" is (if we except the sonnet upon Chapman's Homer) by
far the most important poem in the volume. It was written partly in
Leigh Hunt's cottage at Hampstead, in the library-room, where a sofa-bed
had on one occasion been made up for Keats's convenience, and the latter
lines in the poem refer to objects of art which were kept in the room.
Apart from the impressive line which all readers remember, saying of
poetry--

"'Tis might half-slumbering on its own right arm,"

there are several passages interesting as showing Keats's enthusiasm for
the art in which he was now a beginner, soon to be an adept--

"Oh for ten years that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy!"

also

"The great end
Of poesy, that it should be a friend
To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man;"

and again

"They shall be accounted poet-kings
Who simply tell the most heart-easing things"--

both of these being definitions in which we might imagine Leigh Hunt to
have borne