I now understand for the first time the sufferings and death of the poet. He did not confide to me this serious passion, and it now seems to me but for this cause he might have lived many years. I can now understand his want of courage to speak, as it was consuming him in body and mind.” These words present, it seems to me, a more truthful view of the death than that which Byron and Shelley adopted (for whom less of the curtain had been drawn aside, it is true) in judging his heart vulnerable to any blunt arrow of criticism. One need not deny Keats's sensitiveness in this respect, while emphasising his independence of spirit, and he assuredly had fighting propensities, which he might have found refuge in. If he had not the duck's back for the bitter waters of unmerited censure, he had, at least, the swan's wing wherewith to punish the offender; and had he inherited a robust, instead of a consumptive, bodily frame, there is evidence that he would have rallied from the strokes he received, and smitten his foe (like "The Pythian of the Age"); or, what would have been still better, in the dignity of his soul he would have fulfilled his own purposes, leaving the verdict with the kindlier years to come. The death of Keats has attracted ten times more interest than his life, and, in view of all that has been written on the subject, surely no apology will be demanded for lingering over it in connection with the mention of Fanny Brawne's name; for although Love and Death seemed to wrestle for

possession of him, it was, after all, only a seeming antagonism-they pulled in one direction!

But to return to the poet's life in 1818. He was now living with his kind friend Brown in Wentworth Place, Hampstead, and the lady of his love lived in the next house. Hyperion" had been begun in the winter of this year; the “Eve of St. Agnes" was written in January 1819; the Odes to Psyche" and "To the Nightingale" were composed in April and May; "Otho the Great" (which was written conjointly by Keats and Brown) was finished in August; "Hyperion" abandoned as it now stands, "Lamia" finished, and "To Autumn" written in September. But although his poems flowed from him, he felt harassed about his worldly affairs. Poetry had been to him, as to Coleridge, "its own exceeding great reward;" but the ways and means of sustaining the commoner life we all share with him were difficult to find, and he was now beginning to learn by experience the truth of his own words, which have been quoted, that the wings of his independence were being "cloyed" by his love, and his desire for marriage. In 1819 he resolved to work for periodicals, in which some of his shorter poems appeared separately. His health, however, was meantime precarious, for we find him writing to his sister, in December 1819-“I am fearful lest the weather should affect my throat, which on exertion or cold continually threatens me." The beginning of the end may be told in Lord Houghton's well-known words-"One night (3rd

February 1820), about eleven o'clock, Keats returned home in a state of strange physical excitement-it might have appeared to those who did not know him, one of fierce intoxication. He told his friend he had been outside the stage-coach, had received a severe chill, was a little fevered, but added, 'I don't feel it now.' He was easily persuaded to go to bed, and as he leapt into the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and said, 'That is blood from my mouth; bring me a candle; let me see this blood.' He gazed steadfastly for some moments at the ruddy stain, and then, looking in his friend's face with an expression of sudden calmness never to be forgotten, said, 'I know the colour of that blood-it is arterial blood-I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop is my death-warrant; I must die!""

Coleridge tells us, in his Table Talk, that years before this he met Keats in a lane near Highgate, where he says-" He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said, 'Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!' There is death in that hand, I said to when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly." He seemed to rally for a little during the summer, but the end was near. Early in July 1820 his third volume was published, containing "Lamia," "Isabella," and other poems. It was a copy of this book that was found on the body of Shelley when

the bay of Spezzia gave up that rich instalment of its dead. It was now regarded as fixed in the minds of all his friends that if Keats was to run the faintest chance of recovery, it could only be under milder skies. "I am afraid," writes he to his friend Haydon, "I shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone." How pathetic these words are! How full, also, of that deliberate self-respect (so far from mere self-conceit) which emphasises the value of mind as a gift-making it, as it were, the very basis and justification of life itself. Shelley invited the poet to live with him at Pisa, admitting in a letter to Hunt, "I am aware, indeed, in part, that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me;" and generously adding, "and this is an additional motive, and will be an added pleasure." But Keats declined. Joseph Severn-the artist whose name is indissolubly linked with that of John Keats-had known the poet since 1813; and the labour of love he undertook when he sailed in September 1820 with his invalid friend-praised to the echo as it has been-it would be difficult, indeed, to overvalue. "I am not a little proud of Keats as my friend," said Severn, after the poet's death; and Keats had every reason to be proud of his friend Severn; as no doubt he who expressly placed fine doing above fine writing (vide Letter to J. H. Reynold, 25th August 1819) could not fail to be. Kindest wishes went with him. Leigh Hunt published in the Indicator a little affectionate farewell, in which he said "Thou shalt return with thy friend the

nightingale, and make all thy other friends happy with thy voice, as they are sorrowful to miss it. The little cage thou didst sometime share with us looks as deficient without thee as thy present one may do without us; but, farewell for a while-thy heart is in our fields, and thou wilt soon be back to rejoin it." It was otherwise arranged. The voyagers encountered a storm of some violence in the Bay of Biscay. "What awful music!" cried Severn-as the waves thundered against the reeling vessel and leapt on board, inundating the cabin. "Yes," said Keats-thinking of another parting"water parted from the sea!" Had he not but newly written-"The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible-the sense of darkness coming over me-I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing?" From Naples came these words-which seem in their connection to have been wrung from him almost against his will

“The persuasion that I shall see her no more will kill me. I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die-I cannot bear to leave her. Oh, God! God! God! . . . If I had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me. . . It surprises me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery." friends were now in Rome. In the very last letter he wrote he said "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence." His very last written words

The