lley did to him.
Shelley's only thoughts of his new acquaintance were such as regarded
his bad health with which he sympathised [this about bad health seems
properly to apply to a date later than the opening period when the two
poets came together], and his poetry, of which he has left such a
monument of his admiration as _Adonais_. Keats, being a little too
sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man
of birth a sort of natural enemy. Their styles in writing also were very
different; and Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with
ordinary flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of
_Hyperion_, was so far inferior in universality to his great
acquaintance that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with
Nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own
hands [an allusion to the motto appended to _Queen Mab_]. I am bound to
state thus much; because, hopeless of recovering his health, under
circumstances that made the feeling extremely bitter, an irritable
morbidity appears even to have driven his suspicions to excess; and this
not only with regard to the acquaintance whom he might reasonably
suppose to have had some advantages over him, but to myself, who had
none; for I learned the other day with extreme pain ... that Keats, at
one period of his intercourse with us, suspected both Shelley and myself
of a wish to see him undervalued! Such are the tricks which constant
infelicity can play with the most noble natures. For Shelley let
_Adonais_ answer.' It is to be observed that Hunt is here rather putting
the cart before the horse. Keats (as we shall see immediately) suspected
Shelley and Hunt 'of a wish to see him undervalued' as early as February
1818; but his 'irritable morbidity' when 'hopeless of recovering his
health' belongs to a later date, say the spring and summer of 1820.

It is said that in the spring of 1817 Shelley and Keats agreed that each
of them would undertake an epic, to be written in a space of six months:
Shelley produced _The Revolt of Islam_ (originally entitled _Laon and
Cythna_), and Keats produced _Endymion_. Shelley's poem, the longer of
the two, was completed by the early autumn, while Keats's occupied him
until the winter which opened 1818. On 8th October, 1817, Keats wrote to
a friend, 'I refused to visit Shelley, that I might have my own
unfettered scope; meaning presumably that he wished to finish _Endymion_