ong as memory lasts.
The character and expression of Keats's features would unfailingly
arrest even the casual passenger in the street; and now they were
wrought to a tone of animation that I could not but watch with
intense interest, knowing what was in store for him from the bland
encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention, with fascinating
conversational eloquence, that he was to receive and encounter. When we
reached the Heath, I have present the rising and accelerated step, with
the gradual subsidence of all talk, as we drew towards the cottage. The
interview, which stretched into three "morning calls," was the
prelude to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its
neighborhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household,
and was always welcomed.

It was in the library at Hunt's cottage, where an extemporary bed had
been made up for him on the sofa, that he composed the framework and
many lines of the poem on "Sleep and Poetry,"--the last sixty or seventy
being an inventory of the art-garniture of the room. The sonnet,

"Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there,"

he gave me the day after one of our visits, and very shortly after his
installation at the cottage.

"Give me a golden pen, and let me lean,"

was another, upon being compelled to leave "at an early hour." But the
occasion that recurs to me with the liveliest interest was the evening
when, some observations having been made upon the character, habits,
and pleasant associations of that reverenced denizen of the hearth,
the cheerful little fireside grasshopper, Hunt proposed to Keats the
challenge of writing, then, there, and to time, a sonnet "On the
Grasshopper and the Cricket." No one was present but myself, and they
accordingly set to. I, absent with a book at the end of the sofa, could
not avoid furtive glances, every now and then, at the emulants. I cannot
say how long the trial lasted; I was not proposed umpire, and had no
stop-watch for the occasion: the time, however, was short, for such
a performance; and Keats won, as to time. But the event of the
after-scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the
memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration, for
unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement: his
sincere look of pleasure at the first line,--

"The poetry of earth is never dead";

"Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to