III. POEM "BY ONE BEAUTIFUL MRS. PHILIPS" ("THE MATCHLESS ORINDA") TO MRS. M[ARY] A[WBREY] AT PARTING. I. I HAVE examin'd and do find, Of all that favour me There's none I grieve to leave behind But only, only thee. To part with thee I needs must die, 2. But neither Chance nor Complement 'Twas sacred sympathy was lent Us from the Quire above. That Friendship Fortune did create, Still fears a wound from Time or Fate. This is the poem transcribed by Keats for Reynolds in the letter written from Oxford in September 1817 (see page 75). I presume Bailey's copy of "the matchless Orinda's" works was the folio of 1669, with which I have collated the poem as given in Lord Houghton's Life, Letters &c. (1848) and have found no variations of consequence. 3. Our chang'd and mingled Souls are grown To such acquaintance now, Alas! we know not how. We have each other so engrost, That each is in the Union lost. 4 And thus we can no Absence know, Nor shall we be confin'd; Our active Souls will daily go To learn each others mind. Nay, should we never meet to Sense, 5. Inspired with a Flame Divine I scorn to court a stay; For from that noble Soul of thine I ne're can be away. But I shall weep when thou dost grieve; Nor can I die whil'st thou dost live. 6. By my own temper I shall guess At thy felicity, And only like my happiness Because it pleaseth thee. Our hearts at any time will tell 7. All Honour sure I must pretend, All that is good or great; POEM "BY ONE BEAUTIFUL MRS. PHILIPS." 353 She that would be Rosania's Friend, Must be at least compleat. If I have any bravery, 'Tis cause I have so much of thee. .8. Thy Leiger Soul in me shall lie, 9. Thus our twin-Souls in one shall grow, IO. A Dew shall dwell upon our Tomb That fighting Armies, thither come, Shall reconciled be. We'll ask no Epitaph, but say (7) The Life, Letters &c. has by way of foot-note to line 4 of this stanza,—“A compleat friend'—this line sounded very oddly to me at first." It is not stated whether the note is Keats's. IV. LETTERS FROM SCOTLAND BY CHARLES ARMITAGE BROWN. SIR CHARLES DILKE has recorded in the Memoir of his grandfather prefixed to Papers of a Critic (Volume I, pages 2 and 3) that, in July 1818, Brown wrote to Mr. Dilke as follows: "Keats has been these five hours abusing the Scotch and their country. He says that the women have large splay feet, which is too true to be controverted, and that he thanks Providence he is not related to a Scot, nor any way connected with them." I presume the letter contained nothing else about Keats, as it is not among the Keats collections placed unreservedly at my disposal by Sir Charles, and is believed to have been destroyed with others of Brown's which there seemed no occasion to preserve. The following letter addressed to the late Henry Snook while prosecuting his studies at Eton is valuable as placing Keats's Scotch Tour on record from his companion's point of view. My dear Henry, Inverness, 7th August 1818. Yesterday I had a letter from your Uncle. He told me you had been for a day at Wentworth Place. Why did he not say how you got on at Eton? I am very-very anxious to hear of your success in the Classics. I have thought of you, and your brother, and my two nephews, every day on my walk. To have left you all, after so long having been your companion, sometimes comes across my mind in a painful manner, and the farther I have travelled away the stronger has been the feeling. There may be many who cannot understand why I should think of you so much, but my dear boys know how much I have loved them, and they must likewise know it is not in my nature to be changeable with them. But let the proof of this remain till some future day, that is, the proof of my unchangeableness for in the meanwhile I can have nothing to offer but assurances of affection. It gives me delight to think I have friends growing round me. Do you want to hear about my journey? I think you do; and what else can I have to write about? Come,listen! You shall have an abridgement of the history of Charles Brown's adventures, first part. We set out from Lancaster and went to Windermere Lake, then to Keswick and Derwent Water, and up Mount Skiddaw; these Lakes like all fresh water ones must be in the neighbourhood of great mountains, for they are fed by the springs and rain from the sides of them; it is for this reason they are so beautiful; imagine if you can a large piece of clear, smooth water not round or square like a pond in a Garden but winding about to and fro with parts of the rocks jutting forward in them, and with several little islands peeping up here and there, all wooded with different kinds of trees, while the view upwards rests on grand mountains, one rising above another, with the clouds sailing beneath their summits, and sometimes spreading downwards into the valleys. When we had seen many of these scenes in Cumberland and Westmoreland, we trudged to Carlisle, from which City we took the stage to Dumfries, which was an unin |