Summary
On his American tour Wilde lectures in Louisville on the Mission of Art in the Nineteenth Century and quotes the sonnet on blue. Afterwards Mrs. Speed, George Keats's daughter, shows him the family's Keats letters and manuscripts, and months later, when he is in California, sends him the manuscript of the sonnet. Wilde has it reproduced because it shows 'the gradual growth, not of the conception but of the expression', and so has its value to the artist.
The sonnet was first printed by Lord Houghton in 1848, probably from Charles Brown's manuscripts, in a version later than Wilde's. Since Wilde's first line is torn away, he prints Houghton's text. He then weighs a transcript published in the Athenæum in 1876 by Mr. A. J. Horwood, with readings such as hue for life and bright for wide. Wilde doubts its overlong sixth line, since Keats, having got the line right in his first draft, would hardly spoil it in his second, but welcomes its comma after art in the last line.
He explains Keats's corrections as a reluctance to repeat a word in consecutive lines, and the change from 'his' to 'its' as a wish not to echo the personification of Hesperus. Finally he notes that Keats's eyes were brown, not blue as Mrs. Proctor told Lord Houghton, citing Mrs. George Keats, Cowden Clarke and Severn's portraits.