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."

(III.)

(This is the last letter of the series. Its date is uncertain; but may, as already intimated, be towards July 10, 1820. It follows next after our No. 2.)

"MY DEAREST GIRL,-I wish you could invent some means to make me at all happy without you. Every hour I am more and more concentrated in you; everything else tastes like chaff in my mouth. I feel it almost impossible to go to Italy. The fact is, I cannot leave you, and shall never taste one minute's content until it pleases chance to let me live with you for good. But I will not go on at this rate. A person in health, as you are, can have no conception of the horrors that nerves and a temper like mine go through.

"What island do your friends propose retiring to? I should be happy to go with you there alone, but in company I should object to it: the backbitings and jealousies of new colonists, who have nothing else to amuse themselves, is unbearable. Mr. Dilke came to see me yesterday, and gave me a very great deal more pain than pleasure. I shall never be able any more to endure the society of any of those who used to meet at

Elm Cottage and Wentworth Place. The last two years taste like brass upon my palate. If I cannot live with you, I will live alone.

"I do not think my health will improve much while I am separated from you. For all this, I am averse to seeing you: I cannot bear flashes of light, and return into my glooms again. I am not so unhappy now as I should be if I had seen you yesterday. To be happy with you seems such an impossibility: it requires a luckier star than mine-it will never be.

"I enclose a passage from one of your letters which I want you to alter a little: I want (if you will have it so) the matter expressed less coldly to me.

"If my health would bear it, I could write a poem which I have in my head, which would be a consolation for people in such a situation as mine. I would show some one in love, as I am, with a person living in such liberty as you do." Shakespeare always sums up matters in the most sovereign manner. Hamlet's heart was full of such misery as mine is, when he said to Ophelia, 'Go to a nunnery, go, go!' Indeed, I should like to give up the matter at once-I should like to die. I am sickened at the brute world you are smiling with. I hate men, and women more. I see nothing but thorns for the future:

I observe this name occurring once elsewhere in relation to Keats, but am not clear whose house it represents.

2 It has been suggested (by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as printed in Mr. Forman's edition of Keats) that the poem here referred to is "The Eve of St. Mark." Keats had begun it fully a year and a half before the date of this letter, but, not having continued it, he might have spoken of "having it in his head."

wherever I may be next winter, in Italy or nowhere, Brown will be living near you, with his indecencies. I see no prospect of any rest. Suppose me in Rome. Well, I should there see you, as in a magic glass, going to and from town at all hours- -I wish I could infuse a little confidence of human nature into my heart: I cannot muster any. The world is too brutal for me. I am glad there is such a thing as the grave-I am sure I shall never have any rest till I get there. At any rate, I will indulge myself by never seeing any more Dilke or Brown or any of their friends. I wish I was either in your arms full of faith, or that a thunderbolt would strike me.-God bless you.

“J. K.”

It is seldom one reads a letter (not to speak of a loveletter) more steeped than this in wretchedness and acrimony; wretchedness for which the cause was but too real and manifest; acrimony for which no ground has been shown or is to be surmised. What Mr. Dilke had done, or could be supposed to have done, to merit the invalid's ire, is unapparent. Mr. Brown may be inferred, from the verses of Keats already quoted, to have had the general character and bearing of a bon vivant or "jolly dog"; sufficiently versed in the good things of this world, whether fish, flesh, or womankind; jocose, or on occasion slangy. But Keats himself, in the nearly contemporary letter in which he arraigned Miss Brawne for "flirting with Brown," had said: "I know his love and. friendship for me-at this moment I should be without pence were it not for his assistance;" and we refuse to think that any contingency could be likely to arise in

which his "indecencies" would put Miss Brawne to the blush. Be it enough for us to know that Keats, in the drear prospect of expatriation and death, wrote in this strain, and to wish it were otherwise.

The time had now arrived when Keats was to go to Italy. It was on the 18th of September 1820 that he embarked on the Maria Crowther from London. Haydon gives us a painful glimpse of the poet shortly before his departure: "The last time I saw him was at Hampstead, lying on his back in a white bed, helpless, irritable, and hectic. He had a book, and, enraged at his own feebleness, seemed as if he were going out of the world, with a contempt of this, and no hopes of a better. He muttered as I stood by him that, if he did not recover, he would cut his throat.' I tried to calm him, but to no purpose. I left him, in great depression of spirit to see him in such a state." Another attached friend, of whom I have not yet made mention, accompanied him; and in the annals of watchful and self-oblivious friendship there are few records more touching than the one which links with the name of John Keats that of Joseph Severn. Severn, two years older than Keats, had known him as far back as 1813, being introduced by Mr. William Haslam. Keats was then studying at Guy's Hospital, but none the less gave Severn "the complete idea of a poet." The acquaintance does not seem to have proceeded far at that date; but, through the intervention of Mr. Edward Holmes (author of a "Life of Mozart," and "A Ramble among the Musicians of Germany ") was renewed whilst the poet was composing "Endymion"; and Severn may probably have co-operated in some minor degree with

He had an elegant gift in

Haydon in training Keats to a perception of the great things in plastic art. In 1820 Severn, a student-painter at the Royal Academy, had won the gold medal by his picture of The Cave of Despair, from Spenser, entitling him to the expenses of a three years' stay in Italy, for advancement in his art. music, as well as in painting; and it is a satisfaction to learn that at this period he had "great animal spirits," for without these what he went through during the ensuing five months would have been but too likely to break him down. I must make room here for another letter from Keats, one addressed to his good friend Brown, deeply pathetic, and serving to assuage whatever may have been like "brass upon our palate " in the last-quoted letter to Fanny Brawne.

"Saturday, September 28.

"Maria Crowther, off Yarmouth, Isle of Wight. "MY DEAR BROWN,―The time has not yet come for a pleasant letter from me. I have delayed writing to you from time to time, because I felt how impossible it was to enliven you with one heartening hope of my recovery. This morning in bed the matter struck me in a different manner. I thought I would write' while I was in some liking,' or I might become too ill to write at all, and then, if the desire to have written should become strong, it would be a great affliction to me. I have many more letters to write, and I bless my stars that I have begun, for time seems to press-this may be my best opportunity.

"We are in a calm, and I am easy enough this morning.