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.”

“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.

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.”

“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.

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