On the same day, November 22, Keats writes to Bailey a letter even richer in contents and more self-revealing than this to Reynolds. It gives the indispensable key both to much in his own character and much of the deeper speculative and symbolic meanings underlying his work, from _Endymion_ to the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. Beginning with a wise and tolerant reference to the Haydon trouble, and throwing out a passing hint of the distinction between men of Genius, who have not, and men of Power, who have, a proper individual self or determined character of their own, Keats passes at the close to an illuminating self-confession which is also a contrast between himself and his correspondent:--
You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out,--you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away--I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness--I look not for it if it be not in the present hour,--nothing startles me beyond the moment. The Setting Sun will always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel. The first thing that strikes me on hearing a misfortune having befallen another is this--'Well, it cannot be helped: he will have the pleasure of trying the resources of his Spirit'--and I beg now, my dear Bailey, that hereafter should you observe anything cold in me not to put it to the account of heartlessness, but abstraction--for I assure you I sometimes feel not the influence of a passion or affection during a whole Week--and so long this sometimes continues, I begin to suspect myself, and the genuineness of my feelings at other times--thinking them a few barren Tragedy Tears.
Readers of _Endymion_ will recognize a symbolic embodiment of a mood akin to this in the Cave of Quietude in the fourth book. But the great value of the letter, especially great as a help to the study of _Endymion_ in general, is in the long central passage setting forth his speculations as to the relation of imagination to truth, meaning truth ultimate or transcendental. He finds his clue in the eighth book of _Paradise Lost_, where Adam, recounting to Raphael his first experiences as new-created man, tells how twice over he fell into a dream and awoke to find it true: his first dream thus confirmed in the result being how 'One of shape divine' took him by the hand and led him into the garden of Paradise:[4] his second, how the same glorious shape came to him and opened his side and from his rib fashioned a creature: