says he saw the boat a few minutes before it went down:  he looked again and it was gone.  He saw the boy they had with them aloft furling one of the sails.  We hope his story is true, as their passage from life to death will then have been short; and what adds to the hope is, that in S’s pocket (for the bodies were both thrown on shore some days afterwards,—­conceive our horrible certainty, after trying all we could to hope!) a copy of Keats’s last volume, which he had borrowed of me to read on his passage, was found open and doubled back as if it had been thrust in, in the hurry of a surprise.  God bless him!  I cannot help thinking of him as if he were alive as much as ever, so unearthly he always appeared to me, and so seraphical a thing of the elements; and this is what all his friends say.  But what we all feel, your own heart will tell you....

It has been often feared that Shelley and Captain Williams would meet with some accident, they were so hazardous; but when they set out on the 8th, in the morning it was fine.  Our dear friend was passionately fond of the sea, and has been heard to say he should like it to be his death-bed....

To MRS. PROCTER

Accepting an invitation

5 York Buildings, 13 March [1831].

MY DEAR MRS. PROCTER (for Madam, somehow, is
               not the thing),

I am most pleased to be reminded of my promise, which I must have made if you say I did.  I suppose I have been coming to keep it ever since; but it is a long road from sorrow to joy, and one is apt to get confused on the road.  Do you know your letter brought the tears into my eyes?  I hardly know why, unless it was that I saw Procter had been pouring his kind heart into yours, and you said:—­’We must have him here instead of the coffee-house, and plant him by the fire, and warm him like a stray bird till he sings.’  But indeed a kind word affects me where many a hard thump does not.  Nevertheless, you must not tell this, except to the very masculine or feminine; though if you do not take it as a compliment to yourself,—­I mean the confession of my weakness,—­why, you are not Procter’s wife, nor Mrs. Montagu’s daughter, nor she who wrote the letter this morning to a poor battered author.

PS.  I eat any plain joint, of the plainer order, beef or mutton:—­and you know I care for nothing at dinner, so that it does not hurt me.  Friends’ company is the thing.

To A FRIEND

Offence and punishment

Wimbledon, 11 and 12 August, 1846.