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MEMOIR OF JOHN KEATS.

xxxix

This illness seemed at the time not to be without its compensations: he wrote to Mr. Rice in Feb. (1820):

"For six months before I was taken ill, I had not passed a tranquil day. Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suffering under some passionate feeling, or, if I turned to versify, that acerbated the poison of either sensation. The beauties of nature had lost their power over me. How astonishingly (here I must premise that illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive things in a truer light),—how astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not 'babble,' I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy; their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I want to see again."

And he saw them-for towards the end of the spring his health was apparently so much better that the physician recommended another tour in Scotland. Mr. Brown, however, thought him unfit for the exertion and went alone: the two friends parted in May and never met again. In the previous autumn Keats had removed to a lodging in Westminster,

when he was trying to make some money by contributing to periodical works, but soon found he had miscalculated his own powers of endurance. She, whose name

"Was ever on his lip

But never on his tongue,"

cxercised too mighty a restraint over his being for him to remain at a distance which was neither absence nor presence, and he soon returned to where at least he could rest his eyes on her habitation, and enjoy each chance opportunity of her society. After Mr. Brown's departure, he seems to have been all but domesticated with her family for a short time, but with the sad consciousness of the absolute necessity of some great change of life to ward off absolute destitution. "My mind," he writes, "has been at work all over the world to find out what to do. I have my choice of three things or, at least, twoSouth America, or surgeon to an Indiaman, which last, I think, will be my fate. I shall resolve in a few days."

It was probably this pressure which forced him, against his will, to publish the volume of Tales and Poems, which seemed at last to move even the literary world to some consciousness of his merits. It had no great sale, but it was received respectfully, and, even without the catastrophe that soon invested it with so solemn an interest, it would have gone far to establish him as a poet even in vulgar faune. During its completion he had spent much time on an Ariostolike Poem, which he called the "Cap and Bells,"

exhibiting his play of fancy to great advantage, and getting away as it were, as far as possible, from the gross realities that occupied and tormented his existence. His main passion finds no place in his verse; a few, and not eminent, fragments betray the haunting thought, but the careful exclusion of the topic from his literature adds one more testimony to the truth that the highest poetry exhibits itself in objective forms, moulded and coloured by the feelings and experiences of the writer, and not in subjective representations of his immediate and perhaps temporary sensations.

Keats thought himself to be slowly but surely recovering, when a spitting of blood came on, followed by tightness of the chest and other symptoms, which made it apparent that nothing but a winter in a milder climate would have a chance of saving his life. It is sad to contemplate with what delight, under other auspices, he would have undertaken a visit to those southern lands, the favourites of nature, still tenanted by those mythologic presences of beauty which he had so peculiarly made his own. Now he writes, "the journey to Italy wakes me at daylight every morning, and haunts me horribly. I shall endeavour to go, though it be with the sensation of marching up against a battery." He felt he had a "core of disease in him not easy to pull out," and he had no sufficient hope of ultimate good to remedy the pangs of present separation. He had been tended for a few weeks by the one hand that could soothe him, and that he must leave, perhaps for ever. And he would have had to go alone but for the affection

of Mr. Severn, the young artist, who had just won the gold medal given by the Royal Academy for historical painting which had not been adjudged for the last twelve years. Regardless of personal and professional advantages the painter devoted himself to the afflicted poet, and they started in the middle of September by sea. When scarcely embarked, Keats wrote despondingly to Mr. Brown, taking that opportunity of ease, "for time seems to press." He wishes to write on subjects that would not agitate him, and yet he is ever recurring to that which wears his heart away.

"If my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it; the very thing which I want to live most for will be great occasion of my death. * * I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains, which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever. When the pang of this thought has passed through my mind, I may say the bitterness of death is passed. *I am in a state at present in which

*

woman, merely as woman, can have no more power over me than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my sensations with respect to Miss and my sister is amazing: the one seems to absorb the other to a degree incredible. I seldom think of my brother and sister in America; the thought of leaving Miss

is beyond everything horrible--the sense of darkness coming over me-I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing."

At Naples the gloom grows still darker, and we feel that the night is at hand.

"The fresh air revived me a little, and I hope I am well enough this morning to write you a short calm letter-if that can be called one, in which I am afraid to speak of what I would fainest dwell upon. As I have gone thus far into it, I must go on a little -perhaps it may relieve the load of wretchedness which presses upon me. The persuasion that I shall see her no more will kill me. My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die-I cannot bear to leave her. Oh, God! God! God! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling-cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her-I see her-I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment. This was the case when I was in England. I cannot recollect, without shuddering, the time that I was a prisoner at Hunt's, and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead all day. Then there was a good hope of seeing her again-Now!-O that I could be buried near where she lives. Is there any news of George? O, that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers! then I might hope, but despair is forced upon me as a habit. My dear Brown, for my sake, be her advocate for ever. I cannot say a word about Naples; I do not feel at all concerned in the thousand novelties around me. I am afraid to write to her. I should like her to know that I do not

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