If my spirits seem too low you may in some degree impute it to our having been at sea a fortnight without making any way. I was very disappointed at not meeting you at Bedhampton, and am very provoked at the thought of you being at Chichester to-day. I should have delighted in setting off for London for the sensation merely-for what should I do there? I could not leave my lungs or stomach or other worse things behind

me.

"I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much. There is one I must mention, and have done with it. Even if my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. The very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it—who can help it? Were in health, it would make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state? I daresay you will be able to guess on what subject I am harping: you know what was my greatest pain during the first part of my illness at your house. 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 past. I often wish for you, that you might flatter me with the best.

This may require a word of explanation. Keats, detained at Portsmouth by stress of weather, had landed for a day, and seen his friend Mr. Snook, at Bedhampton. Brown was then in Chichester, only ten miles off, but of this Keats had not at the time been aware.

"I think, without my mentioning it, for my sake you would be a friend to Miss Brawne when I am dead. You think she has many faults: but for my sake think she has not one. If there is anything you can do for her by word or deed, I know you will do it. 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 Brawne 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 Brawne is beyond everything horriblethe sense of darkness coming over me-I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my ears. Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be-we cannot be created for this sort of suffering. The receiving this letter is to be one of yours.

"I will say nothing about our friendship, or rather yours to me, more than that, as you deserve to escape, you will never be so unhappy as I am. I should think of-you in my last moments. I shall endeavour to write to Miss Brawne if possible to-day. A sudden

I

The before "you" appears in the letter, as printed in Mr. Forman's edition of Keats. It might seem that Keats hesitated a moment whether to write "you" or "Miss Brawne."

2 No such letter is known. It has been stated that Keats, after leaving home, could never summon up resolution enough to write to Miss Brawne: possibly this statement ought to be limited to the time after he had reached Italy.

stop to my life in the middle of one of these letters would be no bad thing, for it keeps one in a sort of fever awhile.

"Though fatigued with a letter longer than any I have written for a long while, it would be better to go on for ever than awake to a sense of contrary winds. We expect to put into Portland Roads to-night. The captain, the crew, and the passengers are all ill-tempered and weary. I shall write to Dilke. I feel as if I was closing my last letter to you."

The ship at last proceeded on her voyage, and in the Bay of Biscay encountered a severe squall. Keats soon afterwards read the storm-scene in Byron's "Don Juan" he threw the book away in indignation, denouncing the author's perversity of mind which could "make solemn things gay, and gay things solemn." Late in October he reached the harbour of Naples, and had to perform a tedious quarantine of ten days. After landing on the 31st, he received a second letter from Shelley, then at Pisa, urging him to come to that city. The first letter

I

1 Lord Houghton says that Keats in Naples "could not bear to go to the opera, on account of the sentinels who stood constantly on the stage:" he spoke of "the continual visible tyranny of this government," and said "I will not leave even my bones in the midst of this despotism." Sentinels on the stage have, I believe, been common in various parts of the continent, as a mere matter of government parade, or of routine for preserving public order. The other points (for which no authority is cited by Lord Houghton) must, I think, be over-stated. In November 1820 the short-lived constitution of the kingdom of Naples was in full operation, and neither tyranny nor despotism was in the ascendant-rather a certain degree of popular license.

on this subject, dated in July, had invited Keats to the hospitality of Shelley's own house; but in November this project had been given up, as we are not rich enough for that sort of thing❞—although Shelley still intended (so he wrote to Leigh Hunt) "to be the physician both of his body and his soul,-to keep the one warm, and to teach the other Greek and Spanish." Keats, however, had brought with him a letter of introduction to Dr. (afterwards Sir James) Clark, in Rome,— or indeed he may have met him before leaving England —and he decided to proceed to Rome rather than Pisa. Dr. Clark engaged for him a lodging opposite his own: it was in the first house on the right as you ascend the steps of the Trinità del Monte. The precise date when Keats reached Rome, his last place of torture and of rest, does not appear to be recorded: it was towards the middle of November. He was at first able to walk out a little, and occasionally to ride. Dr. Clark attended his sick bed with the most exemplary assiduity and kindHe pronounced (so Keats wrote to Brown in a letter of November 30th, which is perhaps the last he ever penned) that the lungs were not much amiss, but the stomach in a very bad condition: perhaps this was a kindly equivocation, for by this time—as was ascertained after his death-Keats can have had scarcely any lungs at all. The patient was under no illusion as to his prospects, and he more than once asked the physician "When will this posthumous life of mine come to an end?"

ness.

The only words in which the last days of Keats can be adequately recorded are those of Severn: our best

choice would be between extract and silence. There were oscillations from time to time, from bad to less bad, but generally the tendency of the disease was steadily downwards. The poet's feelings regarding Fanny Brawne were so acute and harrowing that he never mentioned her to his friend. I give a few particulars from Severn's contemporary letters-the person addressed being not always known.

"December 14. His suffering is so great, so continued, and his fortitude so completely gone, that any further change must make him delirious.

"December 17. Not a moment can I be from him. I sit by his bed and read all day, and at night I humour him in all his wanderings. . . . He rushed out of bed and said 'This day shall be my last,' and but for me most certainly it would. The blood broke forth in similar quantity the next morning, and he was bled again. I was afterwards so fortunate as to talk him into a little calmness, and he soon became quite patient. Now the blood has come up in coughing five times. Not a single thing will he digest, yet he keeps on craving for food. Every day he raves he will die from hunger, and I've been obliged to give him more than was allowed. . . . Dr. Clark will not say much. . . . All that can be done he does most kindly; while his lady, like himself i refined feeling, prepares all that poor Keats takes, for -in this wilderness of a place for an invalid—there was no alternative.

...

[To Mrs. Brawne.] "January 11. He has now given up all thoughts, hopes, or even wish, for recovery.