1795-1821
[Sidenote: Bryan Procter’s _Recollections of Men of Letters_.]
“I was first introduced to him (Keats), by Leigh Hunt, and found him
very pleasant, and free from all affectation in manner and opinion.
Indeed it would be difficult to discover a man with a more bright and
open countenance.... I can only say that I never encountered a more
manly and simple young man. In person he was short, and had eyes large
and wonderfully luminous, and a resolute bearing, not defiant but well
sustained.”
[Sidenote: Monckton Milnes’s _Life of Keats_.]
“His eyes were large and blue, his hair auburn, he wore it divided
down the centre, and it fell in rich masses on each side his face,
his mouth was full, and less intellectual than his other features.
His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and
brightness,--it had an expression as if he had been looking on some
glorious sight. The shape of his face had not the squareness of a
man’s, but more like some women’s faces I have seen--it was so wide
over the forehead, and so small at the chin. He seemed in perfect
health, and with life offering all things that were precious to
him.”--1818.
[Sidenote: The Cowden Clarkes’ _Recollections of Writers_.]
_In reviewing this portrait, Mrs. Cowden Clarke, while admitting
that much of it is_ “excellent” _and_ “true,” _goes on to add these
words_: “But when our artist pronounces that ‘his eyes were large and
_blue_,’ and that ‘his hair was _auburn_,’ I am naturally reminded of
the ‘Chameleon’ fable--‘they were _brown_, ma’am--_brown_, I assure
you!’... Reader, alter, in your copy of the _Life of Keats_, vol. i.
page 103, ‘eyes’ light hazel, ‘hair’ _lightish brown and wavy_.”
[Sidenote: Leigh Hunt’s _Autobiography_.]
“Keats, when he died, had just completed his four and twentieth year.
He was under the middle height, and his lower limbs were small in
comparison with the upper, but neat and well-turned. His shoulders were
very broad for his size; he had a face in which energy and sensibility
were remarkably mixed up; an eager power, checked and made patient by
ill-health. Every feature was at once strongly cut, and delicately
alive. If there was any faulty expression, it was in the mouth, which
was not without something of a character of pugnacity. His face was
rather long than otherwise; the upper lip projected a little over the
under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes are mellow and
glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble action,
or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth
trembled. In this there was ill-health as well as imagination, for
he did not like these betrayals of emotion; and he had great personal
as well as moral courage. He once chastised a butcher, who had been
insolent, by a regular stand-up fight. His hair, of a brown colour,
was fine, and hung in natural ringlets. The head was a puzzle for the
phrenologists, being remarkably small in the skull--a singularity which
he had in common with Byron and Shelley, whose hats I could not get
on. Keats was sensible of the disproportion above noticed between his
upper and lower extremities, and he would look at his hand, which was
faded, and swollen in the veins, and say it was the hand of a man of
fifty.”--1826.