The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, by Harry Buxton Forman.

There is good reason to think that the lady to whom the following letters were addressed did not, towards the end of her life, regard their ultimate publication as unlikely; and it is by her family that they have been entrusted to the editor, to be arranged and prepared for the press.

The owners of these letters reserve to themselves all rights of reproduction and translation.

TO JOSEPH SEVERN, ROME.

The happy circumstance that the fifty-seventh year since you watched at the death-bed of Keats finds you still among us, makes it impossible to inscribe any other name than yours in front of these letters, intimately connected as they are with the decline of the poet’s life, concerning the latter part of which you alone have full knowledge.

It cannot be but that some of the letters will give you pain,—and notably the three written when the poet’s face was already turned towards that land whither you accompanied him, whence he knew there was no return for him, and where you[viii] still live near the hallowed place of his burial. All who love Keats’s memory must share such pain in the contemplation of his agony of soul. But you who love him having known, and we who love him unknown except by faith in what is written, must alike rejoice in the good hap that has preserved, for our better knowledge of his heart, these vivid and varied transcripts of his inner life during his latter years,—must alike be content to take the knowledge with such alloy of pain as the hapless turn of events rendered inevitable.

On a memorable occasion it was said of you by a great poet and prophet that, had he known of the circumstances of your unwearied attendance at the death-bed, he should have been tempted to add his “tribute of applause to the more solid recompense which the virtuous man finds[ix] in the recollection of his own motives;” and he uttered the wish that the “unextinguished Spirit” of Keats might “plead against Oblivion” for your name. Were any such plea needed, the Spirit to prefer it, then unextinguished, is now known for inextinguishable; and whithersoever the name of “our Adonais” travels, there will yours also be found.

This opportunity may not unfitly serve to record my gratitude for your ready kindness in affording me information on various points concerning your friend’s life and death, and also for the permission to engrave your solemn portraiture of the beautiful countenance seen, as you only of all men living saw it, in its final agony.

CONTENTS.

Transcriber’s Note: Despite the date on the title page, this is the 1888 edition (see date at end of introduction). The front matter from the prior edition of 1878 seems to have been carried across to this one without being fully checked and updated. This edition doesn’t have an index, and the Appendix about Wentworth Place isn’t on page 111.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

INTRODUCTION.

The sympathetic and discerning biographer of John Keats says, in the memoir prefixed to Moxon’s edition of the Poems [1], “The publication of three small volumes of verse, some earnest friendships, one profound passion, and a premature death are the main incidents here to be recorded.” These words have long become “household words,” at all events in the household of those who make the lives and works of English poets their special study; and nothing is likely to be discovered which shall alter the fact thus set forth.[xiv] But that documents illustrating the fact should from time to time come to the surface, is to be expected; and the present volume portrays the “one profound passion” as perfectly as it is possible for such a passion to be portrayed without the revelation of things too sacred for even the most reverent and worshipful public gaze, while it gives considerable insight into the refinements of a nature only too keenly sensitive to pain and injury and the inherent hardness of things mundane.

The three final years of Keats’s life are in all respects the fullest of vivid interest for those who, admiring the poet and loving the memory of the man, would fain form some conception of the working of those forces within him which went to the shaping of his greatest works and his greatest woes. In those three years were produced most of the compositions wherein the lover of poetry can discern the supreme hand of a master, the ultimate and[xv] sovereign perfection beyond which, in point of quality, the poet could never have gone had he lived a hundred years, whatever he might have done in magnitude and variety; and in those years sprang up and grew the one passion of his life, sweet to him as honey in the intervals of brightness and unimpeded vigour which he enjoyed, bitter as wormwood in those times of sickness and poverty and the deepening shadow of death which we have learned to associate almost constantly with our thoughts of him.

Of certain phases of his life during these final years we have long had substantial and most fascinating records in the beautiful collection of documents entrusted to Lord Houghton, and to what admirable purpose used, all who name the name of Keats know too well to need reminding,—documents published, it is true, under certain restrictions, and subject to the depreciatory operation of asterisks and blanks of[xvi] varying significance and magnitude, proper enough, no doubt, thirty years ago, but surely now a needless affliction. But of the all-important phases in the healthy and morbid psychology of the poet connected with the over-mastering passion of his latter days, the record was necessarily scanty,—a few hints scattered through the letters written in moderately good health, and a few agonized and burning utterances wrung from him, in the despair of his soul, in those last three letters addressed to Charles Brown,—one during the sea voyage and two after the arrival of Keats and Severn in Italy.

It was with the profoundest feeling of the sacredness as well as the great importance of the record entrusted to me that I approached the letters now at length laid before the public: after reading them through, it seemed to me that I knew Keats to some extent as a different being from the Keats I had known; the features of his mind took[xvii] clearer form; and certain mental and moral characteristics not before evident made their appearance. It remained to consider whether this enhanced knowledge of so noble a soul should be confined to two or three persons, or should not rather be given to the world at large; and the decision arrived at was that the world’s claim to participate in the gift of these letters was good.

The office of editor was not an arduous one so far as the text is concerned, for the letters are wholly free from anything which it seems desirable to omit; they are legibly and, except in some minute and trivial details, correctly written, leaving little to do beyond the correction of a few obvious clerical errors, and such amendment of punctuation as is invariably required by letters not written for the press. The arrangement of the series in proper sequence, however, was not nearly so simple a matter; for, except as regards the first[xviii] nine, the evidence in this behalf is almost wholly inferential and collateral; and I have had to be content with strong probability in many cases in which it is impossible to arrive at any absolute certainty. Of the whole thirty-seven letters, not one bears the date of the year, except as furnished in the postmarks of numbers I to IX; two only go so far as to specify in writing the day of the month, or even the month itself; and one of these two Keats has dated a day later than the date shewn by the postmark. Those which passed through the post, numbers I to IX, are fully addressed to “Miss Brawne, Wentworth Place, Hampstead,” the word “Middx.” being added in the case of the six from the country, but not in that of the three from London. Numbers X to XVII and XIX to XXXII are addressed simply to “Miss Brawne”; while numbers XVIII, XXXIII, XXXIV, and XXXVI are addressed to “Mrs. Brawne,” and numbers XXXV and XXXVII bear no address whatever.

These material details are not without a psychological significance: the total absence of interest in the progress of time (the sordid current time) tallies with the profound worship of things so remote as perfect beauty; and the addressing of four of the letters to Mrs. Brawne instead of Miss Brawne indicates, to my mind, not mere accident, but a sensitiveness to observation from any unaccustomed quarter: three of the letters so addressed were certainly written at Kentish Town, and would not be likely to be sent by the same hand usually employed to take those written while the poet was next door to his betrothed; the other one was, I have no doubt, sent only from one house to the other; but perhaps the usual messenger may have chanced to be out of the way.

The letters fall naturally into three groups, namely (1) those written during Keats’s sojourn with Charles Armitage Brown in the Isle of Wight, and his[xx] brief stay in lodgings in Westminster in the Summer and Autumn of 1819, (2) those written from Brown’s house in Wentworth Place during Keats’s illness in the early part of 1820 and sent by hand to Mrs. Brawne’s house, next door, and (3) those written after he was able to leave Wentworth Place to stay with Leigh Hunt at Kentish Town, and before his departure for Italy in September, 1820. Of the order of the first and last groups there is no reasonable doubt; and, although there can be no absolute certainty in regard to the whole series of the central group, I do not think any important error will have been made in the arrangement here adopted.

The slight service to be done beside this of arranging the letters, involving a great deal of minute investigation, was simply to elucidate as far as possible by brief foot-notes references that were not self-explanatory, to give such attainable particulars of the principal persons and places concerned as are desirable by[xxi] way of illustration, and to fix as nearly as may be the chronology of that part of Keats’s life at the time represented by these letters,—especially the two important dates involved. The first date is that of the passion which Keats conceived for Miss Brawne,—the second that of the rupture of a blood-vessel, marking distinctly the poet’s graveward tendency,—two events probably connected with some intimacy, and concerning which it is not unnoteworthy that we should have to be making guesses at all. If these and other conjectural conclusions turn out to be inaccurate (which I do not think will be the case), they can only be proved so by the production of more documents; and if documents be produced confuting my conclusions, my aim will have been attained by two steps instead of one.

The lady to whom these letters were addressed was born on the 9th of August in the year 1800, and baptized Frances, though, as usual with bearers[xxii] of that name, she was habitually called Fanny. Her father, Mr. Samuel Brawne, a gentleman of independent means, died while she was still a child; and Mrs. Brawne then went to reside at Hampstead, with her three children, Fanny, Samuel, and Margaret. Samuel, being next in age to Fanny, was a youth going to school in 1819; and Margaret was many years younger than her sister, being in fact a child at the time of the engagement to Keats, which event took place certainly between the Autumn of 1818 and the Summer of 1819, and probably, as I find good reason to suppose, quite early in the year 1819. In the Summer of 1818 Mrs. Brawne and her children occupied the house of Charles Armitage Brown next to that of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wentworth Dilke, in Wentworth Place, Hampstead, which is not now known by that name. On Brown’s return from Scotland, the Brawne’s moved to another house in the neighbourhood; but they afterwards returned[xxiii] to Wentworth Place, occupying the house of Mr. Dilke. Mr. Severn remembered that when he visited Keats during the residence of the poet with Brown, Keats used to take his visitor “next door” to call upon the Brawne family. “The house was double,” wrote Mr. Severn, “and had side entrances.”

It is said to have been at the house of Mr. Dilke, who was the grandfather of the present Baronet of that name, that Keats first met Miss Brawne. Mr. Dilke eventually gave up possession of his residence in Wentworth Place, and took quarters in Great Smith Street, Westminster, where he and Mrs. Dilke went to live in order that their only child, bearing his father’s name, and afterwards the first Baronet, might be educated at Westminster School.

Keats’s well known weakness in regard to the statement of dates leaves us without such assistance as might be expected from his general correspondence[xxiv] in fixing the date of this first meeting with Miss Brawne. I learn from members of her family that it was certainly in 1818; and, as far as I can judge, it must have been in the last quarter of that year; for it seems pretty evident that he had not conceived the passion, which was his “pleasure and torment,” up to the end of October, and had conceived it before Tom’s death “early in December”; and, as he says in Letter III of the present series, “the very first week I knew you I wrote myself your vassal,” we must perforce regard the date of first meeting as between the end of October and the beginning of December, 1818.

In conducting the reader to this conclusion it will be necessary to remove a misapprehension which has been current for nearly thirty years in regard to a passage in the letter that yields us our starting-point. This is the long letter to George Keats, dated the 29th of October, 1818, given in Lord Houghton’s[xxv] Life, Letters, &c.,[2] and commencing at page 227 of Vol. I, wherein is the following passage:

Now it is clear from this passage that a lady had made a certain impression on Keats; and Lord Houghton in his[xxix] latest publication states explicitly what is only indicated in general terms in the Memoirs published in 1848 and 1867,—that the lady here described was Miss Brawne. In the earlier Memoirs, three letters to Rice, Woodhouse, and Reynolds follow the long letter to George Keats; then comes the statement that “the lady alluded to in the above pages inspired Keats with the passion that only ceased with his existence”; and, as the letter to Reynolds contains references to a lady, it might have been possible to regard Lord Houghton’s expression as an allusion to that letter only. But in the brief and masterly Memoir prefixed to the Aldine Edition of Keats [3], his Lordship cites the passage from the letter of the 29th of October as descriptive of Miss Brawne,—thus confirming by[xxx] explicit statement what has all along passed current as tradition in literary circles.

When Lord Houghton’s inestimable volumes of 1848 were given to the world there might have been indelicacy in making too close a scrutiny into the bearings of these passages; but the time has now come when such cannot be the case; and I am enabled to give the grounds on which it is absolutely certain that the allusion here was not to Miss Brawne. As Lord Houghton has elsewhere recorded, Keats met Miss Brawne at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Dilke, who had no daughters, while the relationship of “the Misses ——” and “Mrs. ——” of the passage in question is clearly that of mother and daughters. Mrs. Brawne had already been settled with her children at Hampstead for several years at this time, whereas this cousin of “the Misses ——” had just arrived when Keats returned there from Teignmouth. The “Charmian” of this anecdote[xxxi] was an East-Indian, having a grandfather to quarrel with; while Miss Brawne never had a grandfather living during her life, and her family had not the remotest connexion with the East Indies. Moreover, Keats’s sister, who is still happily alive, assures me positively that the reference is not to Miss Brawne. In regard to the blank for a surname, I had judged from various considerations internal and external that it should be filled by that of Reynolds; and, on asking Mr. Severn (without expressing any view whatever) whether he knew to whom the story related, he wrote to me that he knew the story well from Keats, and that the reference is to the Misses Reynolds, the sisters of John Hamilton Reynolds. Mr. Severn does not know the name of the cousin of these ladies.

It is clear then that the lady who had impressed Keats some little time before the 29th of October, 1818, and was still fresh in his mind, was not Fanny[xxxii] Brawne. That the impression was not lasting the event shewed; and we may safely assume that it was really limited in the way which Keats himself averred,—that he was not “in love with her.” But it is incredible, almost, that, in his affectionate frankness with his brother, he would ever have written thus of another woman, had he been already enamoured of Fanny Brawne. This view is strengthened by reading the letter to the end: in such a perusal we come upon the following passage:

There is but little after this in the letter, and apparently no break between the time at which he thus expressed himself and that at which he signed the letter and added—“This is my birthday.” If therefore my conclusion as to the negative value of this and the “Charmian” passage be correct, we may say that he was certainly not enamoured of Miss Brawne up to the 29th of October, 1818, although it is tolerably clear, from the evidence of Mr. Dilke, that Keats first met her about October or November. Again, in a highly interesting and important letter to Keats’s most intimate friend John Hamilton Reynolds, a letter which Lord Houghton placed immediately after one to Woodhouse dated the 18th of December, 1818, we read the following ominous passage suggesting a doom not long to be deferred:—

There is no date to this letter; and, although it was most reasonable to suppose that the fervid expressions used pointed to the real heroine of the poet’s tragedy,—that he wrote in one of those moments of mastery of the intellect over the emotions such as he experienced when writing the extraordinary fifth Letter of the present series,—the fact is[xxxvii] that the reference is to “Charmian,” and that the letter was misplaced by Lord Houghton. It really belongs to September 1818, and should precede instead of following this “Charmian” letter.

When Keats wrote the next letter in Lord Houghton’s series (also undated) to George and his wife, Tom was dead; and there is another clue to the date in the fact that he transcribes a letter from Miss Jane Porter dated the 4th of December, 1818. After making this transcript he proceeds to draw the following verbal portrait of a young lady:

There is nothing explicit as to the date of this passage; but there is no longer any doubt that this sketch has reference to Miss Brawne, and that Keats had now found that most dangerous of objects a woman “alternating attraction and repulsion.”

The lady’s children assured me that the description answered to the facts in every particular except that of age: the correct expression would be “not nineteen”; but Keats was not infallible on such a point; and the holograph letter in which he wrote “Miss Brawne” in full shews that he made a mistake as to her age. When he wrote this passage, he was, I should judge, feeling a certain resentment analogous to what found a much more tender expression in the first letter of the present series, when the circumstances made increased tenderness a matter of course,—a resentment of the feeling that he was becoming enslaved.

There is no announcement of his[xl] engagement in the original letter to his brother and sister-in-law, which I have read; and it would seem improbable that he was engaged when he wrote it. But of the journal letter begun on the 14th of February, 1819, and finished on the 3rd of May, only a part of the holograph is accessible; and there may possibly have been such an announcement in the missing part, while, under some date between the 19th of March and the 15th of April, Keats writes the following paragraph and sonnet, from which it might be inferred that the engagement had been announced in an unpublished letter.

Again in the same letter, on the 15th of April, Keats says “Brown, this morning, is writing some Spenserian stanzas against Miss B —— and me,”—a reference, doubtless, to Miss Brawne, probably indicative of the engagement being an understood thing; and, seemingly on the same date, he writes as follows:

The meaning of this dream is sufficiently clear without any light from the fact that the sonnet itself was written in a little volume given by Keats to Miss Brawne, a volume of Taylor & Hessey’s miniature edition of Cary’s Dante, which[xliv] had remained up to the year 1877 in the possession of that lady’s family.[9]

Although the present citation of extant documents does not avail to fix the date of Keats’s passion more nearly than to shew that it almost certainly lies somewhere between the 29th of October and beginning of December, 1818, there can be little doubt that, if a competent person should be permitted to examine all the original documents concerned, the date might be ascertained much more nearly;—that is to say that the particular “first week” of acquaintance in which Keats “wrote himself the[xlv] vassal” of Miss Brawne, as he says (see page 13), might be identified. But in any case it must be well to bring into juxtaposition these passages bearing upon the subject of the letters now made public.

The natural inference from all we know of the matter in hand is that after his brother Tom’s death, Keats’s passion had more time and more temptation to feed upon itself; and that, as an unoccupied man living in the same village with the object of that passion, an avowal followed pretty speedily. It is not surprising that there are no letters to shew for the first half of the year 1819, during which Keats and Miss Brawne probably saw each other constantly, and to judge from the expressions in Letter XI, were in the habit of walking out together.

The tone of Letter I is unsuggestive of more than a few weeks’ engagement; but it is impossible, on this alone, to found safely any conclusion whatever.[xlvi] From the date of that letter, the 3rd of July, 1819, we have plainer sailing for awhile: Keats appears to have remained in the Isle of Wight till the 11th or 12th of August, when he and Brown crossed from Cowes to Southampton and proceeded to Winchester. At page 19 we read under the date “9 August,” “This day week we shall move to Winchester”; but in the letter bearing the postmark of the 16th (though dated the 17th) Keats says he has been in Winchester four days; so that the patience of the friends with Shanklin did not hold out for anything like a week.

At Winchester the poet remained till the 11th of September, when bad news from George Keats hurried him up to Town for a few days: he meant to have returned on the 15th, and was certainly there again by the 22nd, remaining until some day between the 1st and 10th of October, by which date he seems to have taken up his abode at lodgings in College Street, Westminster.[xlvii] Here he cannot have remained long; for on the 19th he was already proposing to return to Hampstead; and it must have been very soon after this that he accepted the invitation of Brown to “domesticate with” him again at Wentworth Place; and on the 19th of the next month he was writing from that place to his friend and publisher, Taylor.[10]

This brings us to the fatal winter of 1819-20, during which, until the date of Keats’s first bad illness, we should not expect any more letters to Miss Brawne, because, in the natural course of things, he would be seeing her daily.

The absence of any current record as to the exact date whereon he was struck down with that particular phase of his malady which he himself felt from the first to be fatal, must have seemed peculiarly regretworthy to Keats’s lovers; but it is not impossible to deduce from the various materials at command the[xlviii] day to which Lord Houghton’s account refers. This well-known passage leaves us in no doubt as to the place wherein the beginning of the end came upon the poet,—the house of Charles Brown; but the day we must seek for ourselves.

Passing over such premonitions of disease as that recorded in the letter to George Keats and his wife dated the 14th of February, 1819, and printed at page 257 of the first volume of the Life, namely that he had “kept in doors lately, resolved, if possible, to rid” himself of “sore throat,”—the first date important to bear in mind is Thursday, the 13th of January, 1820, which is given at the head of a somewhat remarkable version of a well-known letter addressed to Mrs. George Keats. This letter first appeared without date in the Life; but, on the 25th of June, 1877, it was printed in the New York World, with many striking variations from the previous text, and with several additions, including the date already quoted, the genuineness[xlix] of which I can see no reason for doubting. The letter begins thus in the Life, Letters, &c.—

It is not my part to account here for the verbal inconsistency between these two versions; but the inconsistency as regards fact, which has been charged against them, is surely not real. Both versions alike indicate that Keats was writing with the knowledge that his letter would not reach Mrs. George[l] Keats till after the return of her husband from his sudden and short visit to England; and, assuming the genuineness of another document, this was certainly the case.

In The Philobiblion [11] for August, 1862, was printed a fragment purporting to be from a letter of Keats’s, which seems to me, on internal evidence alone, of indubitable authenticity; and, if it is Keats’s, it must belong to the particular letter now under consideration. It is headed Friday 27th, is written in higher spirits, if anything, than the rest of this brilliant letter, giving a ludicrous string of comparisons for Mrs. George Keats’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Henry Wylie, which,[li] together with a final joke, were apparently deemed unripe for publication in 1848, being represented by asterisks in the Life, Letters, &c. (Vol. II, p. 49). The fragment closes with the promise of “a close written sheet on the first of next month,” varying in phrase, just as the World version of the whole letter varies, from Lord Houghton’s.[12]

Keats explains, under the inaccurate and unexplicit date Friday 27th, that he has been writing a letter for George to take back to his wife, has unfortunately forgotten to bring it to town, and will have to send it on to Liverpool, whither George has departed that morning[lii] “by the coach,” at six o’clock. The 27th of January, 1820, was a Thursday, not a Friday; and there can be hardly any doubt that George Keats left London on the 28th of January, 1820, because John, who professed to know nothing of the days of the month, seems generally to have known the days of the week; and this Friday cannot have been in any other month: it was after the 13th of January, and before the 16th of February, on which day Keats wrote to Rice, referring to his illness.[13] But whether the date at the head of the fragment should be Thursday 27th or Friday 28th is immaterial for our present purpose, because the Thursday after that date would be the same day in either case; and it was on the Thursday after George left London that Keats was taken ill. This appears from the following passage extracted by Sir Charles Dilke from a letter of George Keat[liii]s’s to John, and communicated to The Athenæum of the 4th of August, 1877:

Thus, it was on Thursday, the 3rd of February, 1820, that Keats, as recounted by Lord Houghton (Vol. II, pp. 53-4), returned home at about eleven o’clock, “in a state of strange physical excitement,” and told Brown he had received a severe chill outside the stage-coach,—that he coughed up some blood on getting into bed, and read in its colour[liv] his death-warrant. Mr. Severn tells me that Keats left his bed-room within a week of his being taken ill: within a fortnight, as we have seen, he was so far better as to be writing (dismally enough, it is true) to Rice; but, that he was confined to the house for some months, is evident. The whole of the letters forming the second division of the series, Numbers X to XXXII, seem to me to have been written during this confinement; and I should doubt whether Keats did much better, if any, than realize his hope of getting out for a walk on the 1st of May.

At that time he was not sufficiently recovered to accompany Brown on his second tour in Scotland; and was yet well enough by the 7th to be at Gravesend with his friend for the final parting. I understand from the Life, Letters, &c. (Vol. II, p. 60), that Keats then went at once to Kentish Town: Lord Houghton says “to lodge at Kentish Town, to be near his friend Leigh Hunt”; but[lv] Hunt says in his Autobiography (1850), Vol. II, p. 207, “On Brown’s leaving home a second time, ... Keats, who was too ill to accompany him, came to reside with me, when his last and best volume of poems appeared....”[14] These accounts are not necessarily contradictory; for Keats may have tried lodgings near Hunt first, and moved under the same roof with his friend when the lodgings became intolerable, as those in College Street had done before. He was reading the proofs of Lamia, Isabella, &c. on the 11th of June, as shown by a letter to Taylor of that date;[15] and, on the 28th, appeared in The Indicator, beside the Sonnet

the paper entitled “A Now,” at the composition of which Keats is said to have been not only present but assisting;[16] and, as Hunt wrote pretty much “from hand to mouth” for The Indicator, we may safely assume that Keats was with him, at all events till just the end of June. On a second attack of spitting of blood, he returned to Wentworth Place to be nursed by Mrs. and Miss Brawne; and he was writing from there to Taylor on the 14th of August.

Between these two attacks he would seem to have written the letters forming the third series, Numbers XXXIII to XXXVII. I suspect the desperate tone of Number XXXVII had some weight in bringing about the return to Wentworth[lvii] Place; and that this was the last letter Keats ever wrote to Fanny Brawne; for Mr. Severn tells me that his friend was absolutely unable to write to her either on the voyage or in Italy.

There are certain passages in the letters, taking exception to Miss Brawne’s behaviour, particularly with Charles Armitage Brown, which should not, I think, be read without making good allowance for the extreme sensitiveness natural to Keats, and exaggerated to the last degree by terrible misfortunes. Keats was himself endowed with such an exquisite refinement of nature, and, without being in any degree a prophet or propagandist like Shelley, was so intensely in earnest both in art and in life, that anything that smacked of trifling with the sacred passion of love must have been to him more horrible and appalling than to most persons of refinement and culture. Add to this that, for the greater part of the time[lviii] during which his good or evil hap cast him near the object of his affection, his robust spirit of endurance was disarmed by the advancing operations of disease, and his discomfiture in this behalf aggravated by material difficulties of the most galling kind; and we need not be surprised to find things that might otherwise have been deemed of small account making a violent impression upon him. In a memoir [17] of his friend Dilke, written by that gentleman’s grandson, there is an extract from some letter or journal, emanating from whom, and at what date, we are not told, but probably from Mr. or Mrs. Dilke, and which is significant enough: it is at page 11:

This indicates, at all events, a morbid susceptibility on the part of Keats as to the relations of his betrothed with the rest of the world, and must be taken into account in weighing his own words in this connexion. That things went uncomfortably enough to attract the attention of others is indicated again in an extract which Sir Charles Dilke has published on the same page with the foregoing, from a letter written to Mrs. Dilke by Miss Reynolds:

Unhappy, the connexion doubtless was, as the connexion of a doomed man with the whole world is likely to be; but it would be unfair to assume that the engagement to Miss Brawne took a more unfortunate turn than any engagement would probably take for a man circumstanced as Keats was,—a man without independent means, and debarred by ill-health from earning an independence. Above all, it would be both unsafe and extremely unfair to conclude that either Miss Brawne or Keats’s amiable and admirable true friend Charles Brown was guilty of any real levity.

That Keats’s passion was the cause of his death is an assumption which also should be looked at with reserve. Shelley’s immortal Elegy and Byron’s ribald stanzas have been yoked together to draw down the track of years the false notion that adverse criticism killed[lxi] him; and now that that form of murder has been shewn not to have been committed, there seems to be a reluctance to admit that there was no killing in the matter. Sir Charles Dilke says, at page 7 of the Memoir already cited, that Keats “‘gave in’ to a passion which killed him as surely as ever any man was killed by love.” This may be perfectly true; for perhaps love never did kill any man; but surely it must be superfluous to assume any such dire agency in the decease of a man who had hereditary consumption. Coleridge’s often-quoted verdict, “There is death in that hand,” does not stand alone; and the careful reader of Keats’s Life and Letters will find ample evidence of a state of health likely to lead but to one result,—such as the passage already cited in regard to his staying at home determined to rid himself of sore throat, the account of his return, invalided, from the tour in Scotland, which his friends agreed he ought never to have undertaken,[lxii] and his own statement to Mr. Dilke, printed in the Life, Letters, &c. (Vol. II, p. 7), that he “was not in very good health” when at Shanklin.

Lord Houghton’s fine perception of character and implied fact sufficed to prevent his giving any colour to the supposition that Keats was not sufficiently cherished and considered in his latter days: the reproaches that occur in some of the present letters do not lead me to alter the impression conveyed to me on this subject by his Lordship’s memoirs; nor do I doubt that others will make the necessary allowance for the fevered condition of the poet’s mind and the harassed state of body and spirit. Mr. Severn tells me that Mrs. and Miss Brawne felt the keenest regret that they had not followed him and Keats to Rome; and, indeed, I understand that there was some talk of a marriage taking place before the departure. Even twenty years after Keats’s death, when Mr. Severn returned to England, the[lxiii] bereaved lady was unable to receive him on account of the extreme painfulness of the associations connected with him.

In Sir Charles Dilke’s Memoir of his grandfather, there is a strange passage wherein he quotes from a letter of Miss Brawne’s written ten years after Keats’s death,—a passage which might lead to an inference very far from the truth:

That Miss Brawne should have written thus at the end of ten years’ widowhood does not by any means imply[lxiv] weakness of belief in Keats’s fame. Obscurity of life is not identical with obscurity of works; and any one must surely perceive that an application made to her for material for a biography, or even any proposal to publish one, must have been intensely painful to her. She could not bear any discussion of him, and was, till her death in 1865, peculiarly reticent about him; but in her latter years, as a matron with grown-up children, when the world had decided that Keats was not to be left in that obscurity, she said more than once that the letters of the poet, which form the present volume, and about which she was otherwise most uncommunicative, should be carefully guarded, “as they would some day be considered of value.”

It would be irrelevant to the present purpose to recount the facts of this honoured lady’s life; but one or two personal traits may be recorded. She had the gift of independence or self-sufficingness[lxv] in a high degree; and it was not easy to turn her from a settled purpose. This strength of character showed itself in a noticeable manner in the great crisis of her life, and in a manner, too, that has to some extent robbed her of the small credit of devotion to the man whose love she had accepted; for those who knew the truth would not have it discussed, and those who decried her did not know the truth.

On the news of Keats’s death, she cut her hair short and took to a widow’s cap and mourning. She wandered about solitary, day after day, on Hampstead Heath, frequently alarming the family by staying there far into the night, and having to be sought with lanterns. Before friends and acquaintance she affected a buoyancy of spirit which has tended to wrong her memory; but her sister carried into advanced life the recollection that, when the stress of keeping up appearances passed, Fanny[lxvi] spent such time as she remained at home in her own room,—into which the child would peer with awe, and see the unwedded widow poring in helpless despair over Keats’s letters.

Without being in general a systematic student she was a voluminous reader in widely varying branches of literature; and some out-of-the-way subjects she followed up with great perseverance. One of her strong points of learning was the history of costume, in which she was so well read as to be able to answer any question of detail at a moment’s notice. This was quite independent of individual adornment; though, à propos of Keats’s remark, “she manages to make her hair look well,” it may be mentioned that some special pains were taken in this particular, the hair being worn in curls over the forehead, interlaced with ribands. She was an eager politician, with very strong convictions, fiery and animated in discussion; and this characteristic she preserved till the end.

written in reply to John Hamilton Reynolds’s sonnet [18] in which a preference is expressed for dark eyes,—

has no immediate connexion with Miss Brawne; but it is of interest to note that the colour of her eyes was blue, so that the poet was faithful to his preference. No good portrait of her is extant, except the silhouette of which a reproduction is given opposite page 3: a miniature which is perhaps no longer extant is said by her family to have been almost worthless, while the silhouette is regarded as characteristic and accurate as far as such things can be. Mr. Severn, however, told me that the[lxviii] draped figure in Titian’s picture of Sacred and Profane Love, in the Borghese Palace at Rome, resembled her greatly, so much so that he used to visit it frequently, and copied it, on this account. Keats, it seems, never saw this noble picture containing the only satisfactory likeness of Fanny Brawne.

The portrait of Keats which forms the frontispiece to this volume has been etched by Mr. W. B. Scott from a drawing of Severn’s, to which the following words are attached:

Keats’s old schoolfellow, the late Charles Cowden Clarke, assured me in 1876 that this drawing was “a marvellously correct likeness.”

Postscript.—During the past ten years my work in connexion with the writings and doings of Keats has involved the[lxix] discovery and examination of a great mass of documents of a more or less authoritative kind, both printed and manuscript; and many points which were matters of conjecture in 1877 are now no longer so.

Others also have busied themselves about Keats; and, since the foregoing remarks were first published in 1878, Mr. J. G. Speed, a grandson of George Keats, has identified himself with the contributor to the New York World, alluded to at pages xlviii and xlix, in reissuing in America Lord Houghton’s edition of Keats’s Poems, together with a collection of letters.[19] This work, though containing one new letter, unhappily threw no real light whatever either on the inconsistencies of text already referred to or on any other[lxx] question connected with Keats. Later, Professor Sidney Colvin has issued, with a very different result, his volume on Keats [20] included in the “English Men of Letters” series; and I have not hesitated to use, without individual specification, such illustrative facts as have become available, whether from Mr. Colvin’s work or from my own edition of Keats’s whole writings,[21] which also appeared some time after the publication of the Letters to Fanny Brawne, though years before Mr. Colvin’s book.

Two letters, traced since the body of the present volume passed through the press are added at the close of the series; and I have now reason to think that the letter numbered XXVIII should precede that numbered XXV, the date[lxxi] being probably the 23rd or 25th of February, 1820, rather than the 4th of March as suggested in the foot-note at page 78.

The cousin of the Misses Reynolds whom Keats described as a Charmian was Miss Jane Cox,[22] at least so I was most positively assured by Miss Charlotte Reynolds in 1883.

It is now pretty clear that the intention to return to Winchester on the 14th of September, 1819, was not carried out quite literally, and that Keats really returned to that city on the 15th. In regard to the foot-note at page 33, it should now be stated that, in a letter post-marked the 16th of October, 1819, he speaks of having returned to Hampstead after lodging two or three days in the neighbourhood of Mrs. Dilke.

Having mentioned in the foot-note at page 101 that Keats had elsewhere recorded[lxxii] himself and Tom as firm believers in immortality, I must now state that the record cited was a garbled one. Lord Houghton, working from transcripts furnished to him by the late Mr. Jeffrey, the second husband of George Keats’s widow, printed the words “I have a firm belief in immortality, and so had Tom.” The corresponding sentence in the autograph letter is “I have scarce a doubt of an immortality of some kind or another, neither had Tom.”

Finally, it remains to supply an omission which I find it hard to account for. In Medwin’s Life of Shelley occur some important extracts about Keats, seeming to emanate from Fanny Brawne. In 1877 I learnt from the lady’s family that Medwin’s mysteriously introduced correspondent was no other than she. Indeed I had actually cut the relative portion of Medwin’s book out for use in this Introduction; but by some inexplicable oversight I omitted even to[lxxiii] refer to it; and it remained for Professor Colvin to call attention to it. I now gladly follow his lead in citing words which have a direct bearing upon the vexed question of the appreciation of Keats by her whom he loved; and, in the appendix to the present edition, the passage in question will be found.

LETTERS
TO FANNY BRAWNE.

I to IX.
SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, WESTMINSTER.

I-IX.
SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, WESTMINSTER.

Shanklin, Isle of Wight, Thursday.

[Postmark, Newport, 3 July, 1819.]

My dearest Lady,

I am glad I had not an opportunity of sending off a Letter which I wrote for you on Tuesday night—’twas too much like one out of Rousseau’s Heloise. I am more reasonable this morning. The morning is the only proper time for me to write to a beautiful Girl whom I love so much: for at night, when the lonely day has[4] closed, and the lonely, silent, unmusical Chamber is waiting to receive me as into a Sepulchre, then believe me my passion gets entirely the sway, then I would not have you see those Rhapsodies which I once thought it impossible I should ever give way to, and which I have often laughed at in another, for fear you should [think me [23]] either too unhappy or perhaps a little mad. I am now at a very pleasant Cottage window, looking onto a beautiful hilly country, with a glimpse of the sea; the morning is very fine. I do not know how elastic my spirit might be, what pleasure I might have in living here and breathing and wandering as free as a stag about this beautiful Coast if the remembrance of you did not weigh so upon me. I have never known any unalloy’d Happiness for many days together: the death or sickness of some one [24] has always spoilt my hours—and[5] now when none such troubles oppress me, it is you must confess very hard that another sort of pain should haunt me. Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately and do all you can to console me in it—make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me—write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain. But however selfish I may feel, I am sure I could never act selfishly: as I told you a day or two before I left Hampstead, I will never return to London if my Fate does[6] not turn up Pam [25] or at least a Court-card. Though I could centre my Happiness in you, I cannot expect to engross your heart so entirely—indeed if I thought you felt as much for me as I do for you at this moment I do not think I could restrain myself from seeing you again tomorrow for the delight of one embrace. But no—I must live upon hope and Chance. In case of the worst that can happen, I shall still love you—but what hatred shall I have for another! Some lines I read the other day are continually ringing a peal in my ears:

To see those eyes I prize above mine own

Dart favors on another—

And those sweet lips (yielding immortal nectar)

Be gently press’d by any but myself—

Think, think Francesca, what a cursed thing

It were beyond expression!

[7]

Do write immediately. There is no Post from this Place, so you must address Post Office, Newport, Isle of Wight. I know before night I shall curse myself for having sent you so cold a Letter; yet it is better to do it as much in my senses as possible. Be as kind as the distance will permit to your

J. KEATS.

Present my Compliments to your mother, my love to Margaret [26] and best remembrances to your Brother—if you please so.

II.

III.

Sunday Night.

[Postmark, 27 July, 1819.[27]]

My sweet Girl,

I hope you did not blame me much for not obeying your request of a Letter on Saturday: we have had four in our small room playing at cards night and morning leaving me no undisturb’d opportunity to write. Now Rice and Martin are gone I am at liberty. Brown to my sorrow confirms the account you give of your ill health. You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you: how I would die for one hour——for what is in the world? I say you cannot conceive; it is impossible you should[13] look with such eyes upon me as I have upon you: it cannot be. Forgive me if I wander a little this evening, for I have been all day employ’d in a very abstract Poem and I am in deep love with you—two things which must excuse me. I have, believe me, not been an age in letting you take possession of me; the very first week I knew you I wrote myself your vassal; but burnt the Letter as the very next time I saw you I thought you manifested some dislike to me. If you should ever feel for Man at the first sight what I did for you, I am lost. Yet I should not quarrel with you, but hate myself if such a thing were to happen—only I should burst if the thing were not as fine as a Man as you are as a Woman. Perhaps I am too vehement, then fancy me on my knees, especially when I mention a part of your Letter which hurt me; you say speaking of Mr. Severn “but you must be satisfied in knowing that I admired you much more[14] than your friend.” My dear love, I cannot believe there ever was or ever could be any thing to admire in me especially as far as sight goes—I cannot be admired, I am not a thing to be admired. You are, I love you; all I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your Beauty. I hold that place among Men which snub-nos’d brunettes with meeting eyebrows do among women—they are trash to me—unless I should find one among them with a fire in her heart like the one that burns in mine. You absorb me in spite of myself—you alone: for I look not forward with any pleasure to what is call’d being settled in the world; I tremble at domestic cares—yet for you I would meet them, though if it would leave you the happier I would rather die than do so. I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. I hate the world: it[15] batters too much the wings of my self-will, and would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it. From no others would I take it. I am indeed astonish’d to find myself so careless of all charms but yours—remembering as I do the time when even a bit of ribband was a matter of interest with me. What softer words can I find for you after this—what it is I will not read. Nor will I say more here, but in a Postscript answer any thing else you may have mentioned in your Letter in so many words—for I am distracted with a thousand thoughts. I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heathen.

Your’s ever, fair Star,

JOHN KEATS.

My seal is mark’d like a family table cloth with my Mother’s initial F for[16] Fanny:[28] put between my Father’s initials. You will soon hear from me again. My respectful Compliments to your Mother. Tell Margaret I’ll send her a reef of best rocks and tell Sam [29] I will give him my light bay hunter if he will tie the Bishop hand and foot and pack him in a hamper and send him down for me to bathe him for his health with a Necklace of good snubby stones about his Neck.[30]

IV.

Shanklin, Thursday Night.

[Postmark, Newport, 9 August, 1819.]

My dear Girl,

You say you must not have any more such Letters as the last: I’ll try that you shall not by running obstinate the other way. Indeed I have not fair play—I am not idle enough for proper downright love-letters—I leave this minute a scene in our Tragedy [31] and[18] see you (think it not blasphemy) through the mist of Plots, speeches, counterplots and counterspeeches. The Lover is madder than I am—I am nothing to him—he has a figure like the Statue of Meleager and double distilled fire in his heart. Thank God for my diligence! were it not for that I should be miserable. I encourage it, and strive not to think of you—but when I have succeeded in doing so all day and as far as midnight, you return, as soon as this artificial excitement goes off, more severely from the fever I am left in. Upon my soul I cannot say what you could like me for. I do not think myself a fright any more than I do Mr. A., Mr. B., and Mr. C.—yet if I were a woman I should not like A. B. C. But enough of this. So you intend to hold me to my promise of seeing you in a short time. I shall keep it[19] with as much sorrow as gladness: for I am not one of the Paladins of old who liv’d upon water grass and smiles for years together. What though would I not give tonight for the gratification of my eyes alone? This day week we shall move to Winchester; for I feel the want of a Library.[32] Brown will leave me there to pay a visit to Mr. Snook at Bedhampton: in his absence I will flit to you and back. I will stay very little while, for as I am in a train of writing now I fear to disturb it—let it have its course bad or good—in it I shall try my own strength and the public pulse. At Winchester I shall get your Letters more readily; and it[20] being a cathedral City I shall have a pleasure always a great one to me when near a Cathedral, of reading them during the service up and down the Aisle.

Friday Morning.—Just as I had written thus far last night, Brown came down in his morning coat and nightcap, saying he had been refresh’d by a good sleep and was very hungry. I left him eating and went to bed, being too tired to enter into any discussions. You would delight very greatly in the walks about here; the Cliffs, woods, hills, sands, rocks &c. about here. They are however not so fine but I shall give them a hearty good bye to exchange them for my Cathedral.—Yet again I am not so tired of Scenery as to hate Switzerland. We might spend a pleasant year at Berne or Zurich—if it should please Venus to hear my “Beseech thee to hear us O Goddess.” And if she should hear, God forbid we[21] should what people call, settle—turn into a pond, a stagnant Lethe—a vile crescent, row or buildings. Better be imprudent moveables than prudent fixtures. Open my Mouth at the Street door like the Lion’s head at Venice to receive hateful cards, letters, messages. Go out and wither at tea parties; freeze at dinners; bake at dances; simmer at routs. No my love, trust yourself to me and I will find you nobler amusements, fortune favouring. I fear you will not receive this till Sunday or Monday: as the Irishman would write do not in the mean while hate me. I long to be off for Winchester, for I begin to dislike the very door-posts here—the names, the pebbles. You ask after my health, not telling me whether you are better. I am quite well. You going out is no proof that you are: how is it? Late hours will do you great harm. What fairing is it? I was alone for a couple of days while Brown went gadding over the country[22] with his ancient knapsack. Now I like his society as well as any Man’s, yet regretted his return—it broke in upon me like a Thunderbolt. I had got in a dream among my Books—really luxuriating in a solitude and silence you alone should have disturb’d.

Your ever affectionate

JOHN KEATS.

Winchester, August 17th.[33]

[Postmark, 16 August, 1819.]

My dear Girl—what shall I say for myself? I have been here four days and not yet written you—’tis true I have had many teasing letters of business to dismiss—and I have been in the Claws, like a serpent in an Eagle’s, of the last act of our Tragedy. This is no excuse; I know it; I do not presume to offer it. I have no right either[24] to ask a speedy answer to let me know how lenient you are—I must remain some days in a Mist—I see you through a Mist: as I daresay you do me by this time. Believe in the first Letters I wrote you: I assure you I felt as I wrote—I could not write so now. The thousand images I have had pass through my brain—my uneasy spirits—my unguess’d fate—all spread as a veil between me and you. Remember I have had no idle leisure to brood over you—’tis well perhaps I have not. I could not have endured the throng of jealousies that used to haunt me before I had plunged so deeply into imaginary interests. I would fain, as my sails are set, sail on without an interruption for a Brace of Months longer—I am in complete cue—in the fever; and shall in these four Months do an immense deal. This Page as my eye skims over it I see is excessively unloverlike and ungallant—I cannot help it—I am no officer in yawning quarters;[25] no Parson-Romeo. My Mind is heap’d to the full; stuff’d like a cricket ball—if I strive to fill it more it would burst. I know the generality of women would hate me for this; that I should have so unsoften’d, so hard a Mind as to forget them; forget the brightest realities for the dull imaginations of my own Brain. But I conjure you to give it a fair thinking; and ask yourself whether ’tis not better to explain my feelings to you, than write artificial Passion.—Besides, you would see through it. It would be vain to strive to deceive you. ’Tis harsh, harsh, I know it. My heart seems now made of iron—I could not write a proper answer to an invitation to Idalia. You are my Judge: my forehead is on the ground. You seem offended at a little simple innocent childish playfulness in my last. I did not seriously mean to say that you were endeavouring to make me keep my promise. I beg your pardon for it. ’Tis but just[26] your Pride should take the alarm—seriously. You say I may do as I please—I do not think with any conscience I can; my cash resources are for the present stopp’d; I fear for some time. I spend no money, but it increases my debts. I have all my life thought very little of these matters—they seem not to belong to me. It may be a proud sentence; but by Heaven I am as entirely above all matters of interest as the Sun is above the Earth—and though of my own money I should be careless; of my Friends’ I must be spare. You see how I go on—like so many strokes of a hammer. I cannot help it—I am impell’d, driven to it. I am not happy enough for silken Phrases, and silver sentences. I can no more use soothing words to you than if I were at this moment engaged in a charge of Cavalry. Then you will say I should not write at all.—Should I not? This Winchester is a fine place: a beautiful Cathedral and many other[27] ancient buildings in the Environs. The little coffin of a room at Shanklin is changed for a large room, where I can promenade at my pleasure—looks out onto a beautiful—blank side of a house. It is strange I should like it better than the view of the sea from our window at Shanklin. I began to hate the very posts there—the voice of the old Lady over the way was getting a great Plague. The Fisherman’s face never altered any more than our black teapot—the knob however was knock’d off to my little relief. I am getting a great dislike of the picturesque; and can only relish it over again by seeing you enjoy it. One of the pleasantest things I have seen lately was at Cowes. The Regent in his Yatch [34] (I think they spell it) was anchored opposite—a beautiful vessel—and all the Yatchs [28]and boats on the coast were passing and repassing it; and circuiting and tacking about it in every direction—I never beheld anything so silent, light, and graceful.—As we pass’d over to Southampton, there was nearly an accident. There came by a Boat well mann’d, with two naval officers at the stern. Our Bow-lines took the top of their little mast and snapped it off close by the board. Had the mast been a little stouter they would have been upset. In so trifling an event I could not help admiring our seamen—neither officer nor man in the whole Boat moved a muscle—they scarcely notic’d it even with words. Forgive me for this flint-worded Letter, and believe and see that I cannot think of you without some sort of energy—though mal à propos. Even as I leave off it seems to me that a few more moments’ thought of you would uncrystallize and dissolve me. I must not give way to it—but turn to my writing again—if I[29] fail I shall die hard. O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy—I must forget them. Ever your affectionate

KEATS.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X to XXXII.
WENTWORTH PLACE.

X—XXXII.
WENTWORTH PLACE.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII to XXXVII.
KENTISH TOWN—PREPARING FOR ITALY.

XXXIII-XXXVII.
KENTISH TOWN—PREPARING FOR ITALY.

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI.

My dearest Fanny,

My head is puzzled this morning, and I scarce know what I shall say though I am full of a hundred things. ’Tis certain I would rather be writing to you this morning, notwithstanding the alloy of grief in such an occupation, than enjoy any other pleasure, with health to boot, unconnected with you. Upon my soul I have loved you to the extreme. I wish you could know the Tenderness with which I continually brood over your different aspects of countenance, action and dress. I see you come down in the morning: I see you meet me at the Window—I see every thing over again eternally that I ever have seen. If I get on the pleasant[99] clue I live in a sort of happy misery, if on the unpleasant ’tis miserable misery. You complain of my illtreating you in word, thought and deed—I am sorry,—at times I feel bitterly sorry that I ever made you unhappy—my excuse is that those words have been wrung from me by the sharpness of my feelings. At all events and in any case I have been wrong; could I believe that I did it without any cause, I should be the most sincere of Penitents. I could give way to my repentant feelings now, I could recant all my suspicions, I could mingle with you heart and Soul though absent, were it not for some parts of your Letters. Do you suppose it possible I could ever leave you? You know what I think of myself and what of you. You know that I should feel how much it was my loss and how little yours. My friends laugh at you! I know some of them—when I know them all I shall never think of them again as friends or even acquaintance. My[100] friends have behaved well to me in every instance but one, and there they have become tattlers, and inquisitors into my conduct: spying upon a secret I would rather die than share it with any body’s confidence. For this I cannot wish them well, I care not to see any of them again. If I am the Theme, I will not be the Friend of idle Gossips. Good gods what a shame it is our Loves should be so put into the microscope of a Coterie. Their laughs should not affect you (I may perhaps give you reasons some day for these laughs, for I suspect a few people to hate me well enough, for reasons I know of, who have pretended a great friendship for me) when in competition with one, who if he never should see you again would make you the Saint of his memory. These Laughers, who do not like you, who envy you for your Beauty, who would have God-bless’d me from you for ever: who were plying me with disencouragements with respect to you eternally.[101] People are revengful—do not mind them—do nothing but love me—if I knew that for certain life and health will in such event be a heaven, and death itself will be less painful. I long to believe in immortality. I shall never be able to bid you an entire farewell. If I am destined to be happy with you here—how short is the longest Life. I wish to believe in immortality [52]—I wish to live with you for ever. Do not let my name ever pass between you and those laughers; if I have no other merit than the great Love for you, that were sufficient to keep me sacred and unmentioned in such society. If I have been cruel and unjust I swear my love[102] has ever been greater than my cruelty which last [sic] but a minute whereas my Love come what will shall last for ever. If concession to me has hurt your Pride God knows I have had little pride in my heart when thinking of you. Your name never passes my Lips—do not let mine pass yours. Those People do not like me. After reading my Letter you even then wish to see me. I am strong enough to walk over—but I dare not. I shall feel so much pain in parting with you again. My dearest love, I am afraid to see you; I am strong, but not strong enough to see you. Will my arm be ever round you again, and if so shall I be obliged to leave you again? My sweet Love! I am happy whilst I believe your first Letter. Let me be but certain that you are mine heart and soul, and I could die more happily than I could otherwise live. If you think me cruel—if you think I have sleighted you—do muse it over again and see into my heart. My love to you is “true[103] as truth’s simplicity and simpler than the infancy of truth” as I think I once said before. How could I sleight you? How threaten to leave you? not in the spirit of a Threat to you—no—but in the spirit of Wretchedness in myself. My fairest, my delicious, my angel Fanny! do not believe me such a vulgar fellow. I will be as patient in illness and as believing in Love as I am able.

Yours for ever my dearest

JOHN KEATS.

XXXVII.

ADDITIONAL LETTERS.

II bis.

Shanklin

Thursday Evening

[15 July 1819?[54]]

My love,

I have been in so irritable a state of health these two or three last days, that I did not think I should be able to write this week. Not that I was so ill, but so much so as only to be capable of an unhealthy teasing letter. To night I am greatly recovered only to[112] feel the languor I have felt after you touched with ardency. You say you perhaps might have made me better: you would then have made me worse: now you could quite effect a cure: What fee my sweet Physician would I not give you to do so. Do not call it folly, when I tell you I took your letter last night to bed with me. In the morning I found your name on the sealing wax obliterated. I was startled at the bad omen till I recollected that it must have happened in my dreams, and they you know fall out by contraries. You must have found out by this time I am a little given to bode ill like the raven; it is my misfortune not my fault; it has proceeded from the general tenor of the circumstances of my life, and rendered every event suspicious. However I will no more trouble either you or myself with sad prophecies; though so far I am pleased at it as it has given me opportunity to love your disinterestedness towards me.[113] I can be a raven no more; you and pleasure take possession of me at the same moment. I am afraid you have been unwell. If through me illness have touched you (but it must be with a very gentle hand) I must be selfish enough to feel a little glad at it. Will you forgive me this? I have been reading lately an oriental tale of a very beautiful color [55]—It is of a city of melancholy men, all made so by this circumstance. Through a series of adventures each one of them by turns reach some gardens of Paradise where they meet[114] with a most enchanting Lady; and just as they are going to embrace her, she bids them shut their eyes—they shut them—and on opening their eyes again find themselves descending to the earth in a magic basket. The remembrance of this Lady and their delights lost beyond all recovery render them melancholy ever after. How I applied this to you, my dear; how I palpitated at it; how the certainty that you were in the same world with myself, and though as beautiful, not so talismanic as that Lady; how I could not bear you should be so you must believe because I swear it by yourself. I cannot say when I shall get a volume ready. I have three or four stories half done, but as I cannot write for the mere sake of the press, I am obliged to let them progress or lie still as my fancy chooses. By Christmas perhaps they may appear,[56] but I am[115] not yet sure they ever will. ’Twill be no matter, for Poems are as common as newspapers and I do not see why it is a greater crime in me than in another to let the verses of an half-fledged brain tumble into the reading-rooms and drawing-room windows. Rice has been better lately than usual: he is not suffering from any neglect of his parents who have for some years been able to appreciate him better than they did in his first youth, and are now devoted to his comfort. Tomorrow I shall, if my health continues to improve during the night, take a look fa[r]ther about the country, and spy at the parties about here who come hunting after the picturesque like beagles. It is astonishing how they raven down scenery like children do sweetmeats. The wondrous Chine here is a very great Lion: I wish I had as many guineas as there have been spy-glasses in it. I have been, I cannot tell why, in capital spirits this last hour. What reason? When I have[116] to take my candle and retire to a lonely room, without the thought as I fall asleep, of seeing you tomorrow morning? or the next day, or the next—it takes on the appearance of impossibility and eternity—I will say a month—I will say I will see you in a month at most, though no one but yourself should see me; if it be but for an hour. I should not like to be so near you as London without being continually with you: after having once more kissed you Sweet I would rather be here alone at my task than in the bustle and hateful literary chitchat. Meantime you must write to me—as I will every week—for your letters keep me alive. My sweet Girl I cannot speak my love for you. Good night! and

Ever yours

JOHN KEATS.

XXXIV bis.

APPENDIX.

I.
FANNY BRAWNE’S ESTIMATE OF KEATS.

In discussing the effect which the Quarterly Review article had on Keats, Medwin [58] quotes the following passages from a communication addressed to him by Fanny Brawne after her marriage:—

II.
THE LOCALITY OF WENTWORTH PLACE.

The precise locality of Wentworth Place, Hampstead, has been a matter of uncertainty and dispute; and I found even the children of the lady to whom the foregoing letters were addressed without any exact knowledge on the subject. The houses which went to make up Wentworth Place were those inhabited respectively by the Dilke family, the Brawne family, and Charles Armitage Brown; but these were not three houses as might be supposed, the fact being that Mrs. Brawne rented first Brown’s house during his absence with Keats in the summer of 1818, and then Dilke’s when the latter removed to Westminster.

At page 98 of the late Mr. Howitt’s Northern Heights of London,[63] it is said of Keats:—

No authority is given for the statement that John and Tom Keats lodged with the mother of the lady to whom John was attached; and I think it must have arisen from a misapprehension of something communicated to Mr. Howitt, perhaps in such ambiguous terms as every investigator has experienced in his time. At all events I must contradict the statement positively; nor is there any doubt where the brothers did lodge, namely in Well Walk, with the family of the local postman, Benjamin Bentley. Charles Cowden Clarke mentions in his Recollections that the lodging was “in the first or second house on the right hand, going up to the Heath”; and the rate books show that Bentley was rated from 1814 to 1824 for the house which, in 1838, was numbered 1, the house next to the public house formerly called the “Green Man,” but now known as the “Wells” Tavern. At page 102, Mr. Howitt says:—

Mr. Howitt seems to have meant that Wentworth House with the cottages may possibly have borne the name of Wentworth Place; and he should have said that the house was on the right hand in descending John Street. But the fact of the case is correctly stated in Mr. Thorne’s Handbook to the Environs of London,[64] Part I, page 291, where a bolder and more explicit localization is given:

Mr. Thorne adduces no authority for the statement; and it must be assumed that it is based on some of the private communications which he acknowledges generally in his preface. He may possibly have been biassed by the plane-tree which Mr. Howitt, at page[129] 101 of Northern Heights, substitutes for the traditional plum-tree in quoting Lord Houghton’s account of the composition of the Ode to a Nightingale. Certainly there is a fine old plane-tree in front of the house at Lawn Bank; and there is a local tradition of a nightingale and a poet connected with that tree; but this dim tradition may be merely a misty repetition, from mouth to mouth, of Mr. Howitt’s extract from Lord Houghton’s volumes. Primâ facie, a plane-tree might seem to be a very much more likely shelter than a plum-tree for Keats to have chosen to place his chair beneath; and yet one would think that, had Mr. Howitt purposely substituted the plane-tree for the plum-tree, it would have been because he found it by the house which he supposed to be Brown’s. This however is not the case; and it should also be mentioned that at the western end of Lawn Bank, among some shrubs &c., there is an old and dilapidated plum-tree which grows so as to form a kind of leafy roof.

Eleven years ago, when I attempted to identify Wentworth Place beyond a doubt by local and other enquiries, the gardener at Wentworth House assured me very positively that, some fifteen or twenty years before, when Lawn Bank (then called Lawn Cottage) was in bad repair, and the rain had washed nearly all the colour off the front, he used to read the words “Wentworth Place,” painted in large letters beside the top window at the extreme left of the old part of the house as one faces it; and I have since had the pleasure of reading the words there myself; for the colour got washed thin enough again some time afterwards. After a great deal of enquiry among older inhabitants of Hampstead than this gardener, I found[130] a musician, born there in 1801, and resident there ever since, a most intelligent and clear-headed man, who had been in the habit of playing at various houses in Hampstead from the year 1812 onwards. When asked, simply and without any “leading” remark, what he could tell about a group of houses formerly known as Wentworth Place, he replied without hesitation that Lawn Bank, when he was a youth, certainly bore that name, that it was two houses, with entrances at the sides, in one of which he played as early as 1824, and that subsequently the two houses were converted into one, at very great expense, to form a residence for Miss Chester,[65] who called the place Lawn Cottage. This informant did not remember the names of the persons occupying the two houses. A surgeon of repute, among the oldest inhabitants of Hampstead, told me, as an absolute certainty, that he was there as early as 1827, knew the Brawne family, and attended them professionally at Wentworth Place, in the house forming the western half of Lawn Bank. Of Charles Brown, however, this gentleman had no knowledge.

Not perfectly satisfied with the local evidence, I forwarded to Mr. Severn a sketch-plan of the immediate locality, in order that he might identify the houses in which he visited Keats and Brown and the Brawne family: he replied that it was in Lawn Bank that Brown and Mrs. Brawne had their respective residences; and he also mentioned side entrances; but Sir Charles Dilke says his grandfather’s house[131] had the entrance in front, and only Brown’s had a side entrance. Two relatives of Mrs. Brawne’s who were still living in 1877, and were formerly residents in the house, also identified this block as that in which she resided, and so did the late Mr. William Dilke of Chichester, by whose instructions, during the absence of his brother, the name was first painted upon the house. It is hard to see what further evidence can be wanted on the subject. The recollection of one person may readily be distrusted; but where so many memories converge in one result, their evidence must be accepted; and I leave these details on record here, mainly on the ground that doubts may possibly arise again. At present it does not seem as if there could be any possible question that, in Lawn Bank, we have the immortalized Wentworth Place where Keats spent so much time, first as co-inmate with Brown in the eastern half of the block, and at last when he went to be nursed by Mrs. and Miss Brawne in the western half.

It should perhaps be pointed out, in regard to Mr. Thorne’s expression that Keats lodged there, that this was not a case of lodging in the ordinary sense: he was a sharing inmate; and his share of the expenses was duly acquitted, as recorded by Mr. Dilke. In the hope of identifying the houses by some documentary evidence, I had the parish rate-books searched; in these there is no mention of John Street; but that part of Hampstead is described as the Lower Heath Quarter: no names of houses are given; and the only evidence to the purpose is that, among the ratepayers of the Lower Heath Quarter, very few in number, were Charles Wentworth Dilk (without the final e) and Charles Brown. The name of Mrs.[132] Brawne does not appear; but, as she rented the house in Wentworth Place of Mr. Dilke, it may perhaps be assumed that it was he who paid the rates.

It will perhaps be thought that the steps of the enquiry in this matter are somewhat “prolixly set forth”; and the only plea in mitigation to be offered is that, without evidence, those who really care to know the facts of the case could hardly be satisfied.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The Poetical Works of John Keats. With a Memoir by Richard Monckton Milnes. A new Edition. 1863 (and other dates). See p. ix, Memoir.

[2] Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Edited by Richard Monckton Milnes (Two Volumes, Moxon, 1848). My references, throughout, are to this edition; but it will be sufficient to cite it henceforth simply as Life, Letters, &c., specifying the volume and page.

[3] The Poetical Works of John Keats. Chronologically arranged and edited, with a Memoir, by Lord Houghton, D.C.L., Hon. Fellow of Trin. Coll. Cambridge (Bell & Sons, 1876). See p. xxiii, Memoir.

[4] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, pp. 234-6.

[5] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, p. 240.

[6] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, pp. 252-3.

[7] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, p. 268, and Vol. II, p. 301. Should not the semicolon at point change places with the comma at knowledge?

[8] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, p. 270, and Vol. II, p. 302.

[9] This little book, now in my collection, is of great interest. It is marked throughout for Miss Brawne’s use,—according to Keats’s fashion of “marking the most beautiful passages” in his books for her. At one end is written the sonnet referred to in the text, apparently composed by Keats with the book before him, as there are two “false starts,” as well as erasures; and at the other end, in the handwriting of Miss Brawne, is copied Keats’s last sonnet,

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art.

The Spenser similarly marked, the subject of Letter XXXIV, is missing.

[10] See Life, Letters, &c., Vol. II, p. 35.

[11] The Philobiblion a monthly Bibliographical Journal. Containing Critical Notices of, and Extracts from, Rare, Curious, and Valuable Old Books. (Two Volumes. Geo. P. Philes & Co., 51 Nassau Street, New York. 1862-3.) The Keats letter is at p. 196 of Vol. I, side by side with one purporting to be Shelley’s, a flagrant forgery which has been publicly animadverted on several times lately, having been reprinted as genuine.

[12] The correspondent of The World would seem (I only say seem; for the matter is obscure) to have used Lord Houghton’s pages for “copy” where a cursory examination indicated that they gave the same matter as the original letter,—transcribing what presented itself as new matter from the original. The fragment of Friday 27th was, on this supposition, in its place when the copies were made for Lord Houghton, because there is the close; but between that time and 1862 it must have been separated from the letter.

[13] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. II, p. 55.

[14] It is interesting, by the way, to extract the following note of locality from the Autobiography (Vol. II, p. 230): “It was not at Hampstead that I first saw Keats. It was in York-buildings, in the New-road (No. 8), where I wrote part of the Indicator; and he resided with me while in Mortimer-terrace, Kentish-town (No. 13), where I concluded it.”

[15] Life, Letters, &c., Vol. II, p. 61.

[16] See Hunt’s Autobiography, Vol. II, p. 216. It may be noted in passing that the Indicator version of the Sonnet varies in some slight details from the Original in the volume of Dante referred to at page xliv, and from Lord Houghton’s text. It is natural to suppose that Hunt’s copy was the latest of the three; and his text is certainly an improvement on the others where it varies from them.

[17] The Papers of a Critic. Selected from the Writings of the late Charles Wentworth Dilke. With a Biographical Sketch by his Grandson, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Bart., M.P., &c. In Two Volumes. (London. John Murray, Albemarle Street. 1875.) See Vol. I, p. 11.

[18] This sonnet occurs at page 128 of The Garden of Florence; and other Poems. By John Hamilton. (London: John Warren, Old Bond-street. 1821.)

[19] The Letters and Poems of John Keats. In three volumes. (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1883). Vol. I is called The Letters of John Keats, edited by Jno. Gilmer Speed: Vol. II and III, The Poems of John Keats, with the Annotations of Lord Houghton and a Memoir by Jno. Gilmer Speed.

[20] Keats by Sidney Colvin. (Macmillan & Co., 1887). Mr. Colvin has also contributed to Macmillan’s Magazine (August, 1888) an Article On Some Letters of Keats, which I have also duly consulted.

[21] The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats, (Four volumes, Reeves & Turner, 1883, considerably earlier than Mr. Speed’s volumes appeared.)

[22] Charlotte, Mr. Colvin calls her; but her name was Jane.

[23] These two words are wanting in the original.

[24] His brother, “poor Tom,” had died about seven months before the date of this letter.

[25]

Ev’n mighty Pam, that kings and queens o’erthrew,

And mow’d down armies in the fights of Loo,

Sad chance of war! now destitute of aid,

Falls undistinguish’d by the victor Spade!—

Pope’s Rape of the Lock, iii, 61-4.

[26] Fanny’s younger sister: see Introduction.

[27] The word Newport is not stamped on this letter, as on Numbers I, II, and IV; but it is pretty evident that Keats and his friend were still at Shanklin.

[28] I am not aware of any other published record that this name belonged to Keats’s Mother, as well as his sister and his betrothed.

[29] Samuel Brawne, the brother of Fanny: see Introduction.

[30] I am unable to obtain or suggest any explanation of the allusion made in this strange sentence. It is not, however, impossible that “the Bishop” was merely a nickname of some one in the Hampstead circle.

[31] The Tragedy referred to is, of course, Otho the Great, which was composed jointly by Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown. For the first four acts Brown provided the characters, plot, &c., and Keats found the language; but the fifth act is wholly Keats’s. See Lord Houghton’s Life, Letters, &c. (1848), Vol. II, pp. 1 and 2, and foot-note at p. 333 of the Aldine edition of Keats’s Poetical Works (Bell & Sons, 1876). A humorous account of the progress of the joint composition occurs in a letter written by Brown to Dilke, which is quoted at p. 9 of the memoir prefixed by Sir Charles Dilke to The Papers of a Critic, referred to in the Introduction to the present volume, p. lviii.

[32] He did not find one; for, in a letter to B. R. Haydon, dated Winchester, 3 October, 1819, he says: “I came to this place in the hopes of meeting with a Library, but was disappointed.” For this letter see Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk (Two volumes, Chatto and Windus, 1875), Vol. II, p. 16, and also Lord Houghton’s Life, Letters, &c. (1848), Vol. II, p. 10, where there is an extract from the letter somewhat differently worded and arranged.

[33] The discrepancy between the date written by Keats and that given in the postmark is curious as a comment on his statement (Life, Letters, &c., 1848, Vol. I, p. 253) that he never knew the date: “It is some days since I wrote the last page, but I never know....”

[34] This word is of course left as found in the original letter: an editor who should spell it yacht would be guilty of representing Keats as thinking what he did not think.

[35] Written, I presume, from the house of his friends and publishers, Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, No. 93, Fleet Street.

[36] Whether he carried out this intention to the letter, I know not; but he would seem to have been at Winchester again, at all events, by the 22nd of September, on which day he was writing thence to Reynolds (Life, Letters, &c., Vol. II, p. 23).

[37] It would seem to have been in this street that Mr. Dilke obtained for Keats the rooms which the poet asked him to find in the letter of the 1st of October, from Winchester, given at p. 16, Vol. II, of the Life, Letters, &c. (1848). How long Keats remained in those rooms I have been unable to determine, to a day; but in Letter No. IX he writes, eight days later, from Great Smith Street (the address of Mr. Dilke) that he purposes “living at Hampstead”; and there is a letter headed “Wentworth Place, Hampstead, 17th Nov. [1819.]” at p. 35, Vol. II, of the Life, Letters, &c.

[38] It may be that consideration for his correspondent induced this moderation of speech: presumably the scene here referred to is that so graphically given in Lord Houghton’s Life (Vol. II, pp. 53-4), where we read, not that he merely “felt it possible” he “might not survive,” but that he said to his friend, “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.”

[39] This sentence indicates the lapse of perhaps about a week from the 3rd of February, 1820.

[40] This coupling of Brown’s name with ideas of Fanny’s absence or presence seems to be a curiously faint indication of a painful phase of feeling more fully developed in the sequel. See Letters XXI, XXIV, XXVI, XXXV, and XXXVII.

[41] If we are to take these words literally, this letter brings us to the 24th of February, 1820, adopting the 3rd of February as the day on which Keats broke a blood-vessel.

[42] George Keats’s Mother-in-law. The significant but indicates that the absence of Brown was still, as was natural, more or less a condition of the presence of Miss Brawne. That Keats had, however, or thought he had, some reason for this condition, beyond the mere delicacy of lovers, is dimly shadowed by the cold My dear Fanny with which in Letter XXI the condition was first expressly prescribed, and more than shadowed by the agonized expression of a morbid sensibility in Letters XXXV and XXXVII. Probably a man in sound health would have found the cause trivial enough.

[43] The MS. of Lamia, Isabella, &c. (the volume containing Hyperion, and most of Keats’s finest work).

[44] I presume the reference is to Mr. Dilke.

[45] This statement and a general similarity of tone induce the belief that this letter and the preceding one were written about the same time as one to Mr. Dilke, given by Lord Houghton (in the Life, Letters, &c., Vol. II, p. 57), as bearing the postmark, “Hampstead, March 4, 1820.” In that letter Keats cites his friend Brown as having said that he had “picked up a little flesh,” and he refers to his “being under an interdict with respect to animal food, living upon pseudo-victuals,”—just as in Letter XXV he speaks to Miss Brawne of his “feeding upon sham victuals.” In the letter to Dilke he says: “If I can keep off inflammation for the next six weeks, I trust I shall do very well.” In Letter XXV he expresses to Miss Brawne the hope that he may go out for a walk with her on the 1st of May. If these correspondences may be trusted, we are now dealing with letters of the first week in March, of which period there are still indications in Letter XXVIII.

[46] The reference to Barry Cornwall and the cold weather indicate that this letter was written about the 4th of March, 1820; for in the letter to Mr. Dilke, with the Hampstead postmark of that date, already referred to (see page 73), Keats recounts this same affair of the books evidently as a quite recent transaction, and says he “shall not expect Mrs. Dilke at Hampstead next week unless the weather changes for the warmer.”

[47] Misspelt Proctor in the original.

[48] It is of no real consequence what had been said about “old Mr. Dilke,” the grandfather of the first baronet and the father of Keats’s acquaintance; but it is to be noted that this curious letter might have been a little more self-explanatory, had it not been mutilated. The lower half of the second leaf has been cut off,—by whom, the owners can only conjecture.

[49] The piece cut off the original letter is in this instance so small that nothing can be wanting except the signature,—probably given to an autograph-collector.

[50] This extreme bitterness of feeling must have supervened, one would think, in increased bodily disease; for the letter was clearly written after the parting of Keats and Brown at Gravesend, which took place on the 7th of May, 1819, and on which occasion there is every reason to think that the friends were undivided in attachment. I imagine Keats would gladly have seen Brown within a week of this time had there been any opportunity.

[51] This question may perhaps be fairly taken to indicate the lapse of a month from the time when Keats left the house at Hampstead next door to Miss Brawne’s, at which he probably knew her employments well enough from day to day. If so, the time would be about the first week in June, 1819.

[52] He was seemingly in a different phase of belief from that in which the death of his brother Tom found him. At that time he recorded that he and Tom both firmly believed in immortality. See Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, p. 246. A further indication of his having shifted from the moorings of orthodoxy may be found in the expression in Letter XXXV, “I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in:”—not “we believe in.”

[53] This seems to mean that he wrote the letter to the end, and then filled in the words My dearest Girl, left out lest any one coming near him should chance to see them. These words are written more heavily than the beginning of the letter, and indicate a state of pen corresponding with that shown by the words God bless you at the end.

[54] This letter appears to belong between those of the 8th and 25th of July, 1819; and of the two Thursdays between these dates it seems likelier that the 15th would be the one than that the letter should have been written so near the 25th as on the 22nd. The original having been mislaid, I have not been able to take the evidence of the postmark. It will be noticed that at the close he speaks of a weekly exchange of letters with Miss Brawne; and by placing this letter at the 15th this programme is pretty nearly realized so far as Keats’s letters from the Isle of Wight are concerned.

[55] The story in question is one of the many derivatives from the Third Calender’s Story in The Thousand and One Nights and the somewhat similar tale of “The Man who laughed not,” included in the Notes to Lane’s Arabian Nights and in the text of Payne’s magnificent version of the complete work. I am indebted to Dr. Reinhold Köhler, Librarian of the Grand-ducal Library of Weimar, for identifying the particular variant referred to by Keats as the “Histoire de la Corbeille,” in the Nouveaux Contes Orientaux of the Comte de Caylus. Mr. Morris’s beautiful poem “The Man who never laughed again,” in The Earthly Paradise, has familiarized to English readers one variant of the legend.

[56] It will of course be remembered that no such collection appeared until the following summer, when the Lamia volume was published.

[57] I do not find in the present series any letter which I can regard as the particular one referred to in the opening sentence. If Letter XXXV (p. 93) were headed Tuesday and this Wednesday, that might well be the peccant document which appears to be missing.

[58] The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. In Two Volumes. London: 1847 (see Vol. II, pp. 86-93).

[59] It appeared in No. XXXVII, headed “April, 1818,” on page 1, but described on the wrapper as “published in September, 1818.”

[60] See p. liii: it was the 3rd of February, 1820.

[61] See Letter XIII, pp. 49-50.

[62] See Letter XVII, pp. 57-8.

[63] The Northern Heights of London or Historical Associations of Hampstead, Highgate, Muswell Hill, Hornsey, and Islington. By William Howitt, author of ‘Visits to Remarkable Places.’ (London: Longmans, Green, & Co. 1869.)

[64] Handbook to the Environs of London, Alphabetically Arranged, containing an account of every town and village, and of all the places of interest, within a circle of twenty miles round London. By James Thorne, F.S.A. In Two Parts. (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street. 1876.)

[65] She first appeared upon the London boards in 1822, and afterwards became “Private Reader” to George IV.

	PAGE
Publishers’ Note	v.
To Joseph Severn, Rome	vii.
Introduction by the Editor	xiii.
Letters to Fanny Brawne:—
First Period, I to IX, Shanklin, Winchester, Westminster	3
Second Period, X to XXXII, Wentworth Place	43
Third Period, XXXIII to XXXVII, Kentish Town—Preparing for Italy	91
Appendix, The Locality of Wentworth Place	111
Index	123

Portrait of Keats, drawn by Joseph Severn and etched by W. B. Scott	Frontispiece.
Silhouette of Fanny Brawne, cut by Edouart and photo-lithographed by G. F. Tupper	Opposite page 3.
Fac-simile of Letter XXVII, executed by G. I. F. Tupper	Opposite page 76.

NOTE.

TO JOSEPH SEVERN, ROME.

CONTENTS.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

INTRODUCTION.

CORRECTIONS.

LETTERS TO FANNY BRAWNE.

I to IX. SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, WESTMINSTER.

I-IX. SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, WESTMINSTER.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X to XXXII. WENTWORTH PLACE.

X—XXXII. WENTWORTH PLACE.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII to XXXVII. KENTISH TOWN—PREPARING FOR ITALY.

XXXIII-XXXVII. KENTISH TOWN—PREPARING FOR ITALY.

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI.

XXXVII.

ADDITIONAL LETTERS.

ADDITIONAL LETTERS.

II bis.

XXXIV bis.

APPENDIX.

I. FANNY BRAWNE’S ESTIMATE OF KEATS.

II. THE LOCALITY OF WENTWORTH PLACE.

FOOTNOTES

LETTERS
TO FANNY BRAWNE.

I to IX.
SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, WESTMINSTER.

I-IX.
SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, WESTMINSTER.

X to XXXII.
WENTWORTH PLACE.

X—XXXII.
WENTWORTH PLACE.

XXXIII to XXXVII.
KENTISH TOWN—PREPARING FOR ITALY.

XXXIII-XXXVII.
KENTISH TOWN—PREPARING FOR ITALY.

I.
FANNY BRAWNE’S ESTIMATE OF KEATS.

II.
THE LOCALITY OF WENTWORTH PLACE.