Keats

George Keats to England-Attack of Illness in February-Rally in the Spring-Summer in Kentish Town-Publication of

ester proved illusory, or at least could only be maintained at a distance from the great perturbing cause. Two days after his return he went to Hampstead-'into the fire'-and in a moment the flames had seized him more fiercely than ever. It was the first time he had seen his mistress for four months. He found her kind, and from that hour was utterly passion's slave again. In the solitude of his London lodging he found that he could not work nor rest nor fix his thoughts. He must send her a line, he writes to Fanny Brawne two days later, "and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my mind for ever so short a time. Upon my soul

of purpose and failure of power. For the present he determined not to publish Lamia, Isabella, and the other poems written since Endymion. He preferred to await the result of Brown's attempt to get Otho brought on the stage, thinking, no doubt justly, that a success in that field would help to win a candid hearing for his poetry. In the meantime the scoffs of the party critics had brought him so low in estimation that Brown in sending in the play thought it best to withhold his friend's name. The great hope of the authors

r badly it might show in a drama, would, he conceives, be sufficient for a poem; and what he wishes to do next is "to diffuse the colouring of St Agnes' Eve throughout a poem in which character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery." Two or three such poems would be, he thinks, the best gradus to the Parnassum altissimum of true dramatic writing. Meantime, he is for the moment engaged on a task of a different nature. "As the marvellous is

with spirit. It was to be published under the feigned authorship of 'Lucy Vaughan Lloyd,' and to bear the title of the Cap and Bells, or, which he preferred, the Jealousies. This occu

his comic poem the grave Spenserian stanza, with its sustained and involved rhymes and its long-drawn close. Working thus in a vein not truly his own, and hampered moreover by his choice of metre, Keats nevertheless manages his transitions from grave to gay with a light hand, and the movement of the Cap and Bells has much of his characteristic suppleness and grace. In other respects the poem is not a success. The story, which appears to have been one of his own and Brown's invention, turned on the perverse loves of a fairy emperor and a fairy princess of the East. The two are unwillingly betrothed, each being meanwhile enamoured of a mortal. The eighty-eight stanzas, which were all that Keats wrote of the poem, only carry us as far as the flight of the emperor Elfinan for England, which takes place at the moment when his affianced bride alights from her aerial journey to his capital. Into the Elfinan part of the story Keats makes it clear that he meant somehow to weave in the same tale which had been in his mind when he began the fragment of St Mark's Eve at the beginning of the year,-the tale of an English Bertha living in a minster city and beguiled in some way through the reading of a magic book. With this and other

piration of her ancient wisdom. Following a clue which he had found in a Latin book of mythology he had lately bought[62], he now identifies this Greek Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, with the Roman Moneta; and (being possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome was not far from that of Saturn) makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess and guardian of Saturn's temple. His vision takes him first into a grove or garden of delicious fruits, having eaten of which he sinks into a slumber, and awakes to find himself on the floor of a huge primeval temple. Presently a voice, the voice of Moneta, whose form he cannot yet see for the fumes of incense, summons him to climb the steps leading to an image beside which she is offering sacrifice. Obeying her with difficulty, he questions her concerning the mysteries of the place, and learns from her, among other knowledge, that he is standing in the temple of Saturn. Then she withdraws the veils from her face, at sight of which he feels an irresistible desire to learn her thoughts; and thereupon finds himself conveyed in a trance by her side to the ancient scene of Saturn's overthrow. 'Deep in the

this height," re

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, with Mnemosyne, the mother and inspirer of song, enthroned all but inaccessibly above him. If he is a trifler indifferent to the troubles of his fellow men, he is condemned to perish swiftly and be forgotten: he is suffered to approach the goddess, to commune with her and catch her inspiration, only on condition that he shares all th

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ease was turning all his sensations and emotions into pain-at once darkening the shadow of impending poverty, increasing the natural importunity of ill-boding instincts at his heart, and ex

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were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly be expected to offer. As the autumn wore into winter, Keats's sufferings, disguise them as he might, could not escape the notice of his affectionate comrade Brown. Wit

urge, was not enough to heal his many wounds. He listened, and in kindness, or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. He was too thoughtful, or too unquiet, and he began to be reckless of health. Among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times, a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spir

o your Cave of Despair." In December his letters to his sister make mention several times of ill health, and once of a suggestion which had been made to him by Mr Abbey, and which for a moment he was willing to entertain, that he should take advantage of an opening in the tea-broking line in connection with that gentleman's business. Early in January, 1820, George Keats appeared on a short visit to London. He was now settled with his wife and child in the far West, at Louisville on the Ohio. Here his first trading adventure had failed, owing, as he believed, to the dishonesty of the naturalist Audubon who was concerned in it; and he was brought to England by the necessity of getting possession, from the reluctant Abbey, of a further portion of the scanty funds still remaining to the brothers from their grandmother's gift. His visit lasted

overt attack of the fatal mischief which had been set up in his constitution by the exerti

ttle.' He mildly and instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my request that he should go to bed. I followed with the best immediate remedy in my power. I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and I heard him say,-'That is blood from my mouth.' I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet. 'Bring

ttering winter peace of Alpine snows, their dearest and their brightest perish. The malady in Keats's case ran through the usual phases of deceptive rally and inevitable relapse. The doctors would not admit that his lungs were injured, and merely prescribed a lowering regimen and rest from mental excitement. The weakness and nervous prostration of the patient were at first excessive, and he could bear to see nobody but Brown, who nursed him affectionately day and night. After a week or so he was able to receive li

r 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 s

the smack as far as Gravesend, and then returned; not to Hampstead, but to a lodging in Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town. He had chosen this neighbourhood for the sake of the companionship of Leigh Hunt, who was living in Mortimer Street close by. Keats remained at Wesleyan Place for about seven weeks during May and June, living an invalid life, and occasionally taking advantage of the weather to go to an exhibition in London or for a drive on Hampstead Heath. During the first weeks of his illness he had been strictly enjoined to avoid not only the excitement of writing, but even that of reading, poetry. About this time he speaks of intending to begin (meaning begin again) soon on the Cap and Bells. But in fact the only work he really did was that of seeing through the press, with some slight revision of the text, the new volume of poems which his friends had at last induced him to put forward. This is the immortal volume containing Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, and the Odes. Of the poems written during Keats's twenty months of inspiration from March 1818 to October 1819, none of importance

he "would keep his eyes fixed all day," as he afterwards avowed, on Hampstead; and once when at Hunt's suggestion they took a drive in that direction, and rested on a seat in Well Walk, he burst into a flood of unwonted tears, and declared his heart was breaking. In writing to Fanny Brawne he at times cannot disguise nor control his misery, but breaks into piteous outcries, the complaints of one who feels himself chained and desperate while mistress and friends are free, and whose heart is racked between desire and helple

took him into their own home and nursed him. Under the eye and tendance of his betrothed, he found during the next few weeks some mitigation of his sufferings. Haydon came one day to see him, and has told, with a painter's touch, how he found him "lying in a white bed, with white quilt, and white sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic flush of his cheeks. He was deeply affected and so was I[71]." Ever since his relapse at the end of June, Keats had been warned by the doctors that a winter in England would be too much for him, and had been trying to bring himself t

n of Severn, who having won, as we have seen, the gold medal of the Royal Academy the year before, determined now to go and work at Rome with a view to competing for the travelling studentship. Keats and Severn accordingly took passage for Naples on board the ship 'Maria Crowther,' which sailed from London on Sept. 18[72]. Several of the friends who loved Keats best went on board with him as far as Gravesend, and among them Mr Taylor

inds held them beating about the Channel, and ten days after starting they had got no farther than Portsmouth, where Keats landed for a day, and paid a visit to his friends at Bedhampton. On board ship in the Solent immediately afterwards he wrote to Brown a letter confiding to him the secret of his torments more fully than he had ever confided it face to face. Even if his body would recover of itself, his passion, he says would prevent it. "The ver

d the poet himself a testimony in the last and one of the most beautiful of his sonnets. They landed on the Dorsetshire coast, apparently near Lulworth, and spent a day exploring its rocks and caves, the beauties of which Keats showed and interpreted with the delighted insight of one initiated from birth into the secrets of nature. On board ship the same nig

uld I were stedf

lendour hung a

, with etern

patient, sle

ers at their p

on round earth

the new sof

the mountains

tedfast, still

y fair love's r

ver its soft

ver in a sw

hear her tende

ver-or else s

bly immediately after his return from Winchester, they are the only love-verses in which his passion is attuned to tranquillity; and surely no d

incident, except the dropping of a shot across the ship's bow by a Portuguese man-of-war, in order to bring her to and ask a question about privateers. After a voyage of over four weeks, the 'Maria Crowther' arrived in the Bay of Naples, and was there subjected to ten days' quarantine; during which, says Keats, he summoned up, 'in a kind of desperation,' more puns than in the whole course of his life before. A Miss Cotterill, consumptive like himself, was among his fellow-passengers, and to her Keats showed himself full of cheerful kindness from first to last, the sight of her sufferings inwardly preying all the w

ugh 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

mber) Keats suffered seriously from want of proper food: but he was able to take pleasure in the beauty of the land, and of the autumn flowers which Severn gathered for him by the way. Reaching Rome, they settled at once in lodgings which Dr (afterwards Sir James) Clark had taken for them in the Piazza di Spagna, in the first house on the right going up the steps to Sta Trinità dei Monti. Here, according to the manner of those days in Italy, they were left pretty much to shift for themselves. Neither could speak Italian, and at first they were ill served by the trattorìa from which they got their meals, until Keats mended matters by one day coolly emptying all the dishes out of window, and handing them back to the messenger; a hint, says Severn, which was quickly taken. One of Severn's first cares was to get a piano, since nothing soothed Keats's pain so much as music. Fo

at Rome began reading a volume of Alfieri, but drop

sollievo a

anto, ed il pia

of laudanum, and now with agonies of entreaty begged to have it, in order that he might put an end to his misery: and on Severn's refusal, "his tender appeal turned to despair, with all the power of his ardent imagination and bursting heart." It was no unmanly fear of pain in Keats, Severn again and again insists, that prompted this appeal, but above all his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would bring upon his friend. "He explained to me the exact procedure of his gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon the danger to my life and certainly to my fortune of my continued attendance on him." Severn gently p

few weeks, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian, one of the little tokens she had given him at starting, while his companion soothed him with reading or music. His favourite reading was still Jeremy Taylor, and the sonatas of Haydn were the music he liked Severn best to play to him. Of recovery he would not hear, but longed for nothing except the peace of death, and had even weaned, or all but weaned, himself from thoughts of fame. "I feel," he said, "the flowers growing over me," and it seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he gave the words for his epitaph:-"here lies one whose name was writ in water." Ever since his first attack at Wentworth Place he had been used to speak of himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual question to the doctor when he came in was, "Doctor, when will this posthumous life of mine come to an end?" As he turned to ask it neither physician nor friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at all times of extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing un

s Severn, "about four, the approaches of death came on. 'Severn-I-lift me up-I am dying-I shall die easy; don't be frightened-be firm, and thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept." Three days lat