" We had parted, as I have already said, at day-spring; yet he
contrived that I should receive the poem, from a distance of nearly two
miles, before 10, A.M. In the published copy of this sonnet he made an
alteration in the seventh line:--
"Yet did I never breathe its pure serene."
The original, which he sent me, had the phrase,
"Yet could I never tell what men could mean";
which he said was bald, and too simply wondering. No one could more
earnestly chastise his thoughts than Keats. His favorite among Chapman's
Hymns of Homer was the one to Pan, and which he himself rivalled in the
"Endymion."
In one of our conversations about this period, I alluded to his position
at St. Thomas's Hospital,--coasting and reconnoitring, as it were, that
I might discover how he got on, and, with the total absorption that
had evidently taken place of every other mood of his mind than that of
imaginative composition, what was his bias for the future, and what his
feeling with regard to the profession that had been _chosen for him_,--a
circumstance I did not know at that time.
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