the volumes.

The most important of the papers of Severn fell into the hands of Mr. Henry Sotheran of Piccadilly; and I have had the advantage of going over them all and making full collations, either by Mr. Sotheran's kindness or by that of later owners of such as passed from the Piccadilly establishment before I examined the collection. The numerous letters to and from Haydon, preserved in the journals of the painter, have largely enhanced the value of the edition, filling up important blanks and supplying a great number of additions and corrections. The manuscripts of Endymion, Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, and a portion of Isabella should be mentioned as especially fruitful of various readings and cancelled passages; and not the least of the fortunate chances attending my efforts to complete my work for Keats's lovers was the unexpected discovery of Richard Woodhouse's copy of Endymion, in which were noted, not only the variations of the final manuscript from the printed text, but also those of the first draft, which had not itself come to the surface. Woodhouse seems to have been an ardent admirer of Keats and an enthusiastic student of his works, as well as a capital scholar; for his copy of Endymion was interleaved, seemingly while Keats was still alive, and the textual differences above referred to were noted down in the most business-like and elaborate manner, while the pages bear many remarks and hints of a learned and acute kind, whereof I

have not scrupled to avail myself. I think he must have meant to edit Keats's writings at some time. So far as regards the largest of Keats's poems, this book has been of more service than either of the other printed copies of Endymion I have used, namely Sir Charles Dilke's copy and one in my own possession with a number of autograph corrections. But Sir Charles Dilke's copy has a quantity of manuscript poems bound up at the end; and these have yielded a good deal of assistance in textual work.

The letters of Keats to his sister, which form so large a proportion of the letters now first published, throw a flood of new light on his character. We knew him in nearly all relations except that of a protecting brother to a younger sister; and it is this hiatus in his delightful personality that these charming letters fill.

The beautiful couplets which I have gathered in from The Indicator and placed as a rejected passage of Endymion, at page 221 of the present volume, appeared with the signature "XXX"; and I am obliged to confess that, although that signature may be very readily reconciled with the authorship assigned to the passage, it was on purely internal evidence that I placed the couplets where they are. Their manner is absolutely identical with that of the best parts of the poem; and, if Keats did not write it, there were two men living at the time who might, as far as manner goes,

have written any page of Endymion—a conclusion which few critics if any will be prepared to adopt.

The number of The Indicator in which the lines appeared opened with a paper on the Spirit of the Ancient Mythology, the close of which is a paragraph about Wordsworth, illustrated by the insertion of the sonnet "The world is too much with us," a sonnet which on another occasion (Volume IV, page 281) Hunt brought into juxtaposition with Wordsworth's description of the Hymn to Pan as a "pretty piece of paganism." At the end of this mythological number of The Indicator appear our couplets under the title of Vox et præterea nihil, introduced by the following paragraph:

"It does not enter within the plan, or perhaps we should rather say, the understood promises, of this little weekly publication, to relieve the Editor with much correspondence; but he is glad when he can indulge himself, in proportion; and he inserts with pleasure the following piece of poetry, which is very much to his heathenish taste."

Not to rest on my own judgment alone in connecting these verses with Endymion, I sent them to the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was much interested in the scheme and progress of these volumes; and in reply to my enquiry what he thought about the extract he wrote to me thus :

"I remember setting eyes in my earliest days on

the passage you send me, and doubtless came to the conclusion that it must be by Keats, though it had for me no such charm as attached to the wondrous Belle Dame sans Merci I can well understand Keats's rejecting this passage; since, though replete with a general luscious beauty, it is quite without such supreme value in imaginative treatment as (despite some Cockney syllabification) the passage which I suppose to have preceded it. Is there any language in which X is called anything like Keat? In such case the XXX might represent Keats."

The riddle of the meaning of this signature held out during the exchange of several letters; and later on Rossetti wrote to me:

"I should think that triple X almost certainly stands for Triplex in relation to Diana - Luna - Hecate. Keats's text-book was of course Lemprière, and much bearing that way is to be found under those headings there. Keats speaks of the triple character of Diana at the end of the Sonnet to Homer."

To this it should be added that Endymion (Volume I, page 286), when his heart is divided between his Goddess as known to him and the fair Indian in whose form she disguises herself, exclaims "I have a triple soul"; and that Keats himself had certainly three public names, to wit, John Keats, Caviare, and Lucy Vaughan Lloyd, though how far he had mentally adopted the two pen-names by January 1820, I have

no knowledge. Such an explanation as Rossetti's corresponds precisely in idea with a name applied by Keats's schoolfellow Cowper to Charles Cowden Clarke, in whose Recollections, speaking of Cowper, he says:"His jocular school-name for me was 'Three hundred,' in allusion to my initials C. C. C." As regards the actual fabric of the couplets, the difficulty is, not to find something there particularly like Keats's work, but to find a single turn or phrase that is not redolent of him. If one particular point is better to rest on than another, I incline to the couplet

Like the low voice of Syrinx, when she ran

Into the forests from Arcadian Pan :

which is identical in manner and phrase with a less excellent couplet retained in the early sketch meant to have been called Endymion (page 13 of this volume) :

Telling us how fair, trembling Syrinx fled

Arcadian Pan, with such a horrid dread.

Of work attributed to Keats in former editions and rejected from the present volumes there is very little ; but of such rejection as has been necessary an account should be rendered. The poem and sonnet given in Lord Houghton's Aldine edition (and others) as of doubtful authenticity are both omitted because I cannot bring myself to think that Keats had anything more to do with the poem than with the sonnet, which is to be found among Laman Blanchard's works, and