Very soon after the date of this scene of intercoronation (the word is Hunt's, used on a different occasion) Keats became heartily ashamed of it, and expressed his penitence in a strain of ranting verse (his own name for compositions in this vein) under the form of a hymn or palinode to Apollo:--
God of the golden bow, And of the golden lyre, And of the golden hair, And of the golden fire, Charioteer Of the patient year, Where--where slept thine ire, When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath, Thy laurel, thy glory, The light of thy story, Or was I a worm--too low crawling, for death? O Delphic Apollo!
And so forth: the same half-amused spirit of penitence is expressed in a letter of a few weeks later to his brother George: and later still he came to look back, with a smile of manly self-derision, on those days as a time when he had been content to play the part of 'A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce.'
[4] Le Grand: _Fabliaux ou Contes, 1781_. G. L. Way: _Fabliaux or Tales_, London, 1800; 2nd ed. 1815. See Appendix I.
[5] This note-book is in the collection bequeathed by the late Sir Charles Dilke to the public library at Hampstead.
[6] In a review of Keats's first book written the next year (_Examiner_, July 9, 1817) Hunt says that when he printed the 'Solitude' sonnet he knew no more of Keats than of any other anonymous correspondent: but this probably only means that he had not yet met Keats personally.
[7] Putting day-break in early October at a little before six, there would have been fully time enough for Keats to walk to the Poultry, composing as he went, and to commit his draft to paper and send it to Clerkenwell by ten o'clock. The longer walk to and from the Borough, had the date been a year earlier, would have made the feat more difficult. Moreover the feat itself becomes less of a miracle when we recognize it as performed not at the end of the poet's twentieth year but at the end of his twenty first. But in view of Keats's own explicit dating of the piece, the point seems to need no labouring: or else it might be pointed out that if Clarke had really introduced him to Chapman in October 1815 Chapman would assuredly not have been left out of the list of masters whom he quotes as having known through Clarke in his epistle of the following August quoted above (pp. 37, 38).