of the viper and the gander, the hooting of the impostor and the owl. His forthcoming volume was certain to share the same fate; he knew its claims would be perversely resisted and cruelly repudiated. If he could make no serious impression as a poet, not only was his leading ambition thwarted, but he would also be impeded in getting any other and more paying literary work to do-regular profession or employment he had none. He was at best a poor man, and, for the while, almost bereft of any command of funds. So long as this state of things, or anything like it, continued, he would be unable to marry the woman of his heart. While sickness kept him a prisoner, he was torn by ideas of her volatility and fickleness. Disease was sapping his vitals, pain wrung him, Death beckoned him with finger more and more imperative. Poetic fame became the vision of Tantalus, and love the clasp of Ixion.

Such was the life, or such the incipient death, of Keats, in the last twelvemonth of his brief existence.

For half a year prior to February 1820 he had been unrestful and cheerless. "Either that gloom overspread me," so he wrote to James Rice, "or I was suffering under some passionate feeling, or, if I turned to versify, that ex. acerbated the poison of either sensation." He began taking laudanum at times, but was induced by Brown, towards the end of 1819, to promise to give up this insidious practice. Then came the crash: it was at Hampstead, on the night of the 3rd of February.

"One night, about eleven o'clock," I quote the words of Lord Houghton, which have become classical, "Keats

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

A surgeon arrived shortly, bled Keats, and pronounced the rupture to be unimportant, but the patient was not satisfied. He wrote to Miss Brawne some few days afterwards, "So violent a rush of blood came to my lungs that I felt nearly suffocated." By the 6th of the month, however, he was already better, and he then said

This passage is taken from Lord Houghton's "Life, &c., of Keats," first published in 1848, and by "home" he certainly means Wentworth Place, Hampstead. Yet in his Aldine Edition of Keats, his lordship says that the poet "was at that time, very much against Mr. Brown's desire and advice, living alone in London." This latter statement may possibly be correct-I question it. The passage, as written by Lord Houghton, is condensed from the narrative of Brown. The latter is given verbatim in Mr. Colvin's "Keats," and is, of course, the more important and interesting of the two. I abstain from quoting it, solely out of regard to Mr. Colvin's rights of priority.

in a letter to his sister: "From imprudently leaving off my great-coat in the thaw, I caught cold, which flew to my lungs." Later on he suffered from palpitation of the heart; but was so far recovered by the 25th of March as to be able to go to town to the exhibition of Haydon's picture, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, and early in April he could take a walk of five miles. In March he had written that he was then picking up flesh, and, if he could avoid inflammation for six weeks, might yet do well; in April his doctor assured him that his only malady was nervous irritability and general weakness, caused by anxiety and by the excitement of poetry. At an untoward time for his health, about the first week in May, Keats was obliged to quit his residence in Hampstead; as Brown was then leaving for Scotland, and, according to his wont, let the house. Keats accordingly went to live in Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town. A letter which he wrote just before his departure speaks of his uncertain outlook; he might be off to South America, or, more likely, embarking as surgeon on a vessel trading to the East Indies. This latter idea had been in his mind for about a year past, off and on. What he could have contemplated doing in South America is by no means apparent. On the 7th of May Keats parted at Gravesend from Brown, and they never met again. The hand with which he grasped Brown's, and which he had of old "clenched against Hammond's," was now, according to his own words, "that of a man of fifty."

Things had thus gone on pretty well with Keats's health since he first began to rally from the bloodspitting attack of the 3rd of February; but this was not

to continue. On the 22nd of June he again broke a blood-vessel, and vomited blood morning and evening. Leigh Hunt thought it high time to intervene, and removed the patient to his house, No. 13 Mortimer Terrace, Kentish Town. By the 7th of July-just about the time when Keats's last volume was published, the one containing "Lamia," "Hyperion," and all his best works-the physician had told him that he must not remain in England, but go to Italy. On the 12th, Mrs. Gisborne, the friend of Godwin and of Shelley, saw him at Hunt's house, looking emaciated, and "under sentence of death from Dr. Lamb." Three days afterwards he wrote to Haydon "I am afraid I shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone." The stay at Leigh Hunt's house came to an end in a way which speaks volumes for the shattered nerves, and consequent morbid susceptibility, of Keats. On the 10th of August a note for him written by Miss Brawne, which "contained not a word of the least consequence," arrived at the house. Keats was then resting in his own room, and Mrs. Hunt, who was occupied, desired a female servant to give it to him. The servant quitted the household on the following day; and, in leaving, she handed the letter to Thornton Hunt, then a mere child, asking him to reconsign it to his mother. When Thornton did this on the 12th, the letter was open; opened (one assumes) either by the servant through idle curiosity, or by Thornton through simple childishness. "Poor Keats was affected by this inconceivable circumstance beyond what can be imagined. He wept for several hours, and resolved, notwithstanding Hunt's entreaties, to leave the house. He went to

Hampstead that same evening." In Hampstead he had at least the solace of being received into the dwelling occupied by the Brawne family, being the same dwelling (next door to that of Brown and Keats) which had been recently tenanted by the Dilkes; yet the excitement of feeling, consequent on the continual presence of Miss Brawne, was perhaps harmful to him. Here he remained until the time for journeying to Italy arrived. He was still, it seems, left in some uncertainty as to the precise nature and gravity of his disease, for on the 14th of August he wrote to his sister: "'Tis not yet consumption, I believe; but it would be, were I to remain in this climate all the winter." Anyhow, his expectations of recovery, or of marked benefit from the Italian sojourn, were but faint.

Something may here be said of the love-letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne. They begin (as already stated) on the 1st of July 1819, and end at some date between his leaving Hampstead, early in May 1820, and quitting Hunt's house in August. We may assume the 10th July 1820, or thereabouts, as the date of the last letter. I cannot say that the character of Keats gains to my eyes from the perusal of this correspondence. Love-letters are not expected to be models of self-regulation and "the philosophic mind"; they would be bad love-letters, or letters of a bad specimen of a lover, if they were so. Still, one wants a man to show himself, quâ lover, at his highest in letters of this stamp; one wants to find in them his noblest self, his steadiest as his most ardent aspirations, in one direction. Keats seems to me, throughout his love-letters, unbalanced, wayward, and profuse; he ex