gh
she "manages to make her hair look well," she "wants sentiment in every
feature." Propinquity, however, has achieved the usual result; and now
the young poet believes his inamorata to be the very apotheosis of
loveliness: he is never weary of adoring her

Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast,
Warm breath, light whisper, tender semitone,
Bright eyes, accomplished shape!

If the truth be told, Fanny Brawne is a fairly good-looking young woman,
blue-eyed and long-nosed, her hair arranged with curls and ribbons over
her brow: she has a curious but striking resemblance to the draped
figure in Titian's "Sacred and Profane Love": and for the rest, she is
by no means poetic or sentimental, but a voluminous reader, whose strong
point is an extraordinary knowledge of the history of costume. She
accepts the homage of Keats, much as she accepts the fact of their tacit
betrothal, and the fact that her mother disapproves of it--without
taking it too seriously in any sense. And now, though not particularly
keen on open-air enjoyment, she accepts his daily suggestion of a walk
with her; and they go out into the beautiful meadows which were part of
Hampstead a hundred years ago.

Keats is in his glory in the fields. Always, the humming of a bee, the
sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, have "seemed to make his
nature tremble: then his eyes flashed, his cheek glowed, his mouth
quivered." Peculiarly sensitive, as he is, to external influences, his
chief delight is to "think of green fields ... I muse with the greatest
affection on every flower I have known from my infancy." The man who
is so soon to "feel the daisies growing over him," takes one of his
intensest pleasures in watching the growth of flowers; and now, as an
exquisite music, "notes that pierce and pierce," descends through the
young green oak-leaves, the poet seizes this golden moment of the May
world and transmutes it into song.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not with envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,--
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cool'd a long age in t