spirits by the task which now awaited him of tending on his dying brother. For the last two or three months of 1818, [xv]until Tom's death in December, he scarcely left the bedside, and it was well for him that his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was at hand to help and comfort him after the long strain. Brown persuaded Keats at once to leave the house, with its sad associations, and to come and live with him.Before long poetry absorbed Keats again; and the first few months of 1819 were the most fruitful of his life. Besides working at Hyperion, which he had begun during Tom's illness, he wrote The Eve of St. Agnes, The Eve of St. Mark, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and nearly all his famous odes.
Troubles however beset him. His friend Haydon was in difficulties and tormenting him, poor as he was, to lend him money; the state of his throat gave serious cause for alarm; and, above all, he was consumed by an unsatisfying passion for the daughter of a neighbour, Mrs. Brawne. She had rented Brown's house whilst they were in Scotland, and had now moved to a street near by. Miss Fanny Brawne returned his love, but she seems never to have understood his nature or his needs. High-spirited and fond of pleasure she
did not apparently allow the thought of her invalid lover to interfere much with her enjoyment of life. She would not, however, [xvi] abandon her engagement, and she probably gave him all which it was in her nature to give. Ill-health made him, on the other hand, morbidly dissatisfied and suspicious; and, as a result of his illness and her limitations, his love throughout brought him restlessness and torment rather than peace and comfort.
4
Towards the end of July he went to Shanklin and there, in collaboration with Brown, wrote a play, Otho the Great. Brown tells us how they used to sit, one on either side of a table, he sketching out the scenes and handing each one, as the outline was finished, to Keats to write. As Keats never knew what was coming it was quite impossible that the characters should be adequately conceived, or that the drama should be a united whole. Nevertheless there is much that is beautiful and promising in it. It should not be forgotten that Keats's 'greatest ambition' was, in his own words, 'the writing of a few fine plays'; and, with the increasing humanity and grasp which his poetry shows, there is no reason to suppose that, had he lived, he would not have fulfilled it.
At Shanklin, moreover, he had begun to write Lamia, and he continued it at Winchester. Here he [xvii]stayed until the middle of October, excepting a few days which he spent in London to arrange about the sending of some money to his brother in America. George had been unsuccessful in his commercial enterprises, and Keats, in view of his family's ill-success, determined temporarily to abandon poetry, and by reviewing or journalism to support himself and earn money to help his brother. Then, when he could afford it, he would return to poetry.
Accordingly he came back to London, but his health was breaking down, and with it his resolution. He tried to re-write Hyperion, which he felt had been written too much under the influence of Milton and in 'the artist's humour'. The same independence of spirit which he had shown in the publication of Endymion urged him now to abandon a work the style of which he did not feel to be absolutely his own. The re-cast he wrote in the form of a vision, calling it The Fall of Hyperion, and in so doing he added much to his conception of the meaning of the story. In no poem does he show more of the profoundly philosophic spirit which characterizes many of his letters. But it was too late; his power was failing and, in spite of the beauty and interest of [xviii]some of his additions, the alterations are mostly for the worse.
Whilst The Fall of Hyperion occupied his evenings his mornings were spent over a satirical fairy-poem, The Cap and Bells, in the metre of the Faerie Queene. This metre, however, was ill-suited to the subject; satire was not natural to him, and the poem has little intrinsic merit.
Neither this nor the re-cast of Hyperion was finished when, in February, 1820, he had an attack of illness in which the first definite symptom of consumption appeared. Brown tells how he came home on the evening of Thursday, February 3rd, in a state of high fever, chilled from having ridden outside the coach on a bitterly cold day. 'He mildly and instantly yielded to my request that he should go to bed . . . On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and I heard him say--"that is blood from my mouth". I went towards him: he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet. "Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood." After regarding it steadfastly he looked up in my face with a calmness of expression that I can never forget, and said, "I know the colour of that blood;--it is arterial [xix]blood; I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop of blood is my death warrant;--I must die."'
He lived for another year, but it was one long dying: he himself called it his 'posthumous life'.
Keats was one of the most charming of letter-writers. He had that rare quality of entering sympathetically into the mind of the friend to whom he was writing, so that his letters reveal to us much of the character of the recipient as well as of the writer. In the long journal-letters which he wrote to his brother and sister-in-law in America he is probably most fully himself, for there he is with the people who knew him best and on whose understanding and sympathy he could rely. But in none is the beauty of his character more fully revealed than in those to his little sister Fanny, now seventeen years old, and living with their guardian, Mr. Abbey. He had always been very anxious that they should 'become intimately acquainted, in order', as he says, 'that I may not only, as you grow up, love you as my only Sister, but confide in you as my dearest friend.' In his most harassing times he continued to write to her, direct-ing her reading, sympathizing [xx]in her childish troubles, and constantly thinking of little presents to please her. Her health was to him a matter of paramount concern, and in his last letters to her we find him reiterating warnings to take care of herself--'You must be careful always to wear warm clothing not only in Frost but in a Thaw.'--'Be careful to let no fretting injure your health as I have suffered it--health is the greatest of blessings--with health and hope we should be content to live, and so you will find as you grow older.' The constant recurrence of this thought becomes, in the light of his own sufferings, almost unbearably pathetic.
During the first months of his illness Keats saw through the press his last volume of poetry, of which this is a reprint. The praise which it received from reviewers and public was in marked contrast to the scornful reception of his earlier works, and would have augured well for the future. But Keats was past caring much for poetic fame. He dragged on through the summer, with rallies and re-lapses, tormented above all by the thought that death would separate him from the woman he loved. Only Brown, of all his friends, knew what he was suffering, and it seems that he only knew fully after they were parted.
[xxi]The doctors warned Keats that a winter in England would kill him, so in September, 1820, he left London for Naples, accom-panied by a young artist, Joseph Severn, one of his many devoted friends. Shelley, who knew him slightly, invited him to stay at Pisa,
5
but Keats refused. He had never cared for Shelley, though Shelley seems to have liked him, and, in his invalid state, he naturally shrank from being a burden to a mere acquaintance.
It was as they left England, off the coast of Dorsetshire, that Keats wrote his last beautiful sonnet on a blank leaf of his folio copy
of Shakespeare, facing A Lover's Complaint:--
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art-- Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-- No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,[xxii] Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
