NOTE.

There is good reason to think that the lady to whom the following letters were addressed did not, towards the end of her life, regard their ultimate publication as unlikely; and it is by her family that they have been entrusted to the editor, to be arranged and prepared for the press.

The owners of these letters reserve to themselves all rights of reproduction and translation.

[vi]

[vii]

TO JOSEPH SEVERN, ROME.

The happy circumstance that the fifty-seventh year since you watched at the death-bed of Keats finds you still among us, makes it impossible to inscribe any other name than yours in front of these letters, intimately connected as they are with the decline of the poet’s life, concerning the latter part of which you alone have full knowledge.

It cannot be but that some of the letters will give you pain,—and notably the three written when the poet’s face was already turned towards that land whither you accompanied him, whence he knew there was no return for him, and where you[viii] still live near the hallowed place of his burial. All who love Keats’s memory must share such pain in the contemplation of his agony of soul. But you who love him having known, and we who love him unknown except by faith in what is written, must alike rejoice in the good hap that has preserved, for our better knowledge of his heart, these vivid and varied transcripts of his inner life during his latter years,—must alike be content to take the knowledge with such alloy of pain as the hapless turn of events rendered inevitable.

On a memorable occasion it was said of you by a great poet and prophet that, had he known of the circumstances of your unwearied attendance at the death-bed, he should have been tempted to add his “tribute of applause to the more solid recompense which the virtuous man finds[ix] in the recollection of his own motives;” and he uttered the wish that the “unextinguished Spirit” of Keats might “plead against Oblivion” for your name. Were any such plea needed, the Spirit to prefer it, then unextinguished, is now known for inextinguishable; and whithersoever the name of “our Adonais” travels, there will yours also be found.

This opportunity may not unfitly serve to record my gratitude for your ready kindness in affording me information on various points concerning your friend’s life and death, and also for the permission to engrave your solemn portraiture of the beautiful countenance seen, as you only of all men living saw it, in its final agony.

H. B. F.

[x]

[xi]

CONTENTS.

Transcriber’s Note: Despite the date on the title page, this is the 1888 edition (see date at end of introduction). The front matter from the prior edition of 1878 seems to have been carried across to this one without being fully checked and updated. This edition doesn’t have an index, and the Appendix about Wentworth Place isn’t on page 111.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

[xii]

[xiii]

INTRODUCTION.

The sympathetic and discerning biographer of John Keats says, in the memoir prefixed to Moxon’s edition of the Poems[1], “The publication of three small volumes of verse, some earnest friendships, one profound passion, and a premature death are the main incidents here to be recorded.” These words have long become “household words,” at all events in the household of those who make the lives and works of English poets their special study; and nothing is likely to be discovered which shall alter the fact thus set forth.[xiv] But that documents illustrating the fact should from time to time come to the surface, is to be expected; and the present volume portrays the “one profound passion” as perfectly as it is possible for such a passion to be portrayed without the revelation of things too sacred for even the most reverent and worshipful public gaze, while it gives considerable insight into the refinements of a nature only too keenly sensitive to pain and injury and the inherent hardness of things mundane.

The three final years of Keats’s life are in all respects the fullest of vivid interest for those who, admiring the poet and loving the memory of the man, would fain form some conception of the working of those forces within him which went to the shaping of his greatest works and his greatest woes. In those three years were produced most of the compositions wherein the lover of poetry can discern the supreme hand of a master, the ultimate and[xv] sovereign perfection beyond which, in point of quality, the poet could never have gone had he lived a hundred years, whatever he might have done in magnitude and variety; and in those years sprang up and grew the one passion of his life, sweet to him as honey in the intervals of brightness and unimpeded vigour which he enjoyed, bitter as wormwood in those times of sickness and poverty and the deepening shadow of death which we have learned to associate almost constantly with our thoughts of him.

Of certain phases of his life during these final years we have long had substantial and most fascinating records in the beautiful collection of documents entrusted to Lord Houghton, and to what admirable purpose used, all who name the name of Keats know too well to need reminding,—documents published, it is true, under certain restrictions, and subject to the depreciatory operation of asterisks and blanks of[xvi] varying significance and magnitude, proper enough, no doubt, thirty years ago, but surely now a needless affliction. But of the all-important phases in the healthy and morbid psychology of the poet connected with the over-mastering passion of his latter days, the record was necessarily scanty,—a few hints scattered through the letters written in moderately good health, and a few agonized and burning utterances wrung from him, in the despair of his soul, in those last three letters addressed to Charles Brown,—one during the sea voyage and two after the arrival of Keats and Severn in Italy.

It was with the profoundest feeling of the sacredness as well as the great importance of the record entrusted to me that I approached the letters now at length laid before the public: after reading them through, it seemed to me that I knew Keats to some extent as a different being from the Keats I had known; the features of his mind took[xvii] clearer form; and certain mental and moral characteristics not before evident made their appearance. It remained to consider whether this enhanced knowledge of so noble a soul should be confined to two or three persons, or should not rather be given to the world at large; and the decision arrived at was that the world’s claim to participate in the gift of these letters was good.

The office of editor was not an arduous one so far as the text is concerned, for the letters are wholly free from anything which it seems desirable to omit; they are legibly and, except in some minute and trivial details, correctly written, leaving little to do beyond the correction of a few obvious clerical errors, and such amendment of punctuation as is invariably required by letters not written for the press. The arrangement of the series in proper sequence, however, was not nearly so simple a matter; for, except as regards the first[xviii] nine, the evidence in this behalf is almost wholly inferential and collateral; and I have had to be content with strong probability in many cases in which it is impossible to arrive at any absolute certainty. Of the whole thirty-seven letters, not one bears the date of the year, except as furnished in the postmarks of numbers I to IX; two only go so far as to specify in writing the day of the month, or even the month itself; and one of these two Keats has dated a day later than the date shewn by the postmark. Those which passed through

the post, numbers I to IX, are fully addressed to “Miss Brawne, Wentworth Place, Hampstead,” the word “Middx.” being added in the case of the six from the country, but not in that of the three from London. Numbers X to XVII and XIX to XXXII are addressed simply to “Miss Brawne”; while numbers XVIII, XXXIII, XXXIV, and XXXVI are addressed to “Mrs. Brawne,” and numbers XXXV and XXXVII bear no address whatever.

[xix]

These material details are not without a psychological significance: the total absence of interest in the progress of time (the sordid current time) tallies with the profound worship of things so remote as perfect beauty; and the addressing of four of the letters to Mrs. Brawne instead of Miss Brawne indicates, to my mind, not mere accident, but a sensitiveness to observation from any unaccustomed quarter: three of the letters so addressed were certainly written at Kentish Town, and would not be likely to be sent by the same hand usually employed to take those written while the poet was next door to his betrothed; the other one was, I have no doubt, sent only from one house to the other; but perhaps the usual messenger may have chanced to be out of the way.

The letters fall naturally into three groups, namely (1) those written during Keats’s sojourn with Charles Armitage Brown in the Isle of Wight, and his[xx] brief stay in lodgings in Westminster in the Summer and Autumn of 1819, (2) those written from Brown’s house in Wentworth Place during Keats’s illness in the early part of 1820 and sent by hand to Mrs. Brawne’s house, next door, and (3) those written after he was able to leave Wentworth Place to stay with Leigh Hunt at Kentish Town, and before his departure for Italy in September, 1820. Of the order of the first and last groups there is no reasonable doubt; and, although there can be no absolute certainty in regard to the whole series of the central group, I do not think any important error will have been made in the arrangement here adopted.

The slight service to be done beside this of arranging the letters, involving a great deal of minute investigation, was simply to elucidate as far as possible by brief foot-notes references that were not self-explanatory, to give such attainable particulars of the principal persons and places concerned as are desirable by[xxi] way of illustration, and to fix as nearly as may be the chronology of that part of Keats’s life at the time represented by these letters,—especially the two important dates involved. The first date is that of the passion which Keats conceived for Miss Brawne,—the second that of the rupture of a blood-vessel, marking distinctly the poet’s graveward tendency,—two events probably connected with some intimacy, and concerning which it is not unnoteworthy that we should have to be making guesses at all. If these and other conjectural conclusions turn out to be inaccurate (which I do not think will be the case), they can only be proved so by the production of more documents; and if documents be produced confuting my conclusions, my aim will have been

attained by two steps instead of one.

The lady to whom these letters were addressed was born on the 9th of August in the year 1800, and baptized Frances, though, as usual with bearers[xxii] of that name, she was habitually called Fanny. Her father, Mr. Samuel Brawne, a gentleman of independent means, died while she was still a child; and Mrs. Brawne then went to reside at Hampstead, with her three children, Fanny, Samuel, and Margaret. Samuel, being next in age to Fanny, was a youth going to school in 1819; and Margaret was many years younger than her sister, being in fact a child at the time of the engagement to Keats, which event took place certainly between the Autumn of 1818 and the Summer of 1819, and probably, as I find good reason to suppose, quite early in the year 1819. In the Summer of 1818 Mrs. Brawne and her children occupied the house of Charles Armitage Brown next to that of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wentworth Dilke, in Wentworth Place, Hampstead, which is not now known by that name. On Brown’s return from Scotland, the Brawne’s moved to another house in the neighbourhood; but they afterwards returned[xxiii]

to Wentworth Place, occupying the house of Mr. Dilke. Mr. Severn remembered that when he visited Keats during the residence of the poet with Brown, Keats used to take his visitor “next door” to call upon the Brawne family. “The house was double,” wrote Mr. Severn, “and had side entrances.”

It is said to have been at the house of Mr. Dilke, who was the grandfather of the present Baronet of that name, that Keats first met Miss Brawne. Mr. Dilke eventually gave up possession of his residence in Wentworth Place, and took quarters in Great Smith Street, Westminster, where he and Mrs. Dilke went to live in order that their only child, bearing his father’s name, and afterwards the first Baronet, might be educated at Westminster School.

Keats’s well known weakness in regard to the statement of dates leaves us without such assistance as might be expected from his general correspondence[xxiv] in fixing the date of this first meeting with Miss Brawne. I learn from members of her family that it was certainly in 1818; and, as far as I can judge, it must have been in the last quarter of that year; for it seems pretty evident that he had not conceived the passion, which was his “pleasure and torment,” up to the end of October, and had conceived it before Tom’s death “early in December”; and, as he says in Letter III of the present series, “the very first week I knew you I wrote myself your vassal,” we must perforce regard the date of first meeting as between the end of October and the beginning of December, 1818.

In conducting the reader to this conclusion it will be necessary to remove a misapprehension which has been current for nearly thirty years in regard to a passage in the letter that yields us our starting-point. This is the long letter to George Keats, dated the 29th of October, 1818, given in Lord Houghton’s[xxv] Life, Letters, &c.,[2] and commencing at page 227 of Vol. I, wherein is the following passage:

“The Misses —— are very kind to me, but they have lately displeased me much, and in this way:—now I am coming the Richardson!—On my return, the first day I called, they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a cousin of theirs, who, having fallen out with her grandpapa in a serious manner, was invited by Mrs. —— to take asylum in her house. She is an East-Indian, and ought to be her grandfather’s heir. At the time I called, Mrs. —— was in conference with her up stairs, and the young ladies were warm in her praise down stairs, calling her genteel, interesting, and a thousand other pretty things, to which I gave no[xxvi] heed, not being partial to nine days’ wonders. Now all is completely changed: they hate her, and, from what I hear, she is not without faults of a real kind; but she has others, which are more apt to make women of inferior claims hate her. She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at least, a Charmian: she has a rich Eastern look; she has fine eyes, and fine manners. When she comes into the room she makes the same impression as

the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her: from habit she thinks that nothing particular. I always find myself more at ease with such a woman: the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am, at such times, too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble: I forget myself entirely, because I live in her. You will, by this time, think I am in love with her, so, before I go any further, I will[xxvii] tell you I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart’s might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of whose life is to me a banquet. I don’t cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like her, and her like, because one has no sensations: what we both are is taken for granted. You will suppose I have, by this, had much talk with her—no such

thing; there are the Misses —— on the look out. They think I don’t admire her because I don’t stare at her; they call her a flirt to me—what a want of knowledge! She walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn towards her with a magnetic power; this they call flirting! They do not know things; they do not know what a woman is. I believe, though, she has faults, the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might[xxviii] have had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things—the worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian, hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child’s cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me.

This is ‘Lord Byron,’ and is one of the finest things he has said.”

Now it is clear from this passage that a lady had made a certain impression on Keats; and Lord Houghton in his[xxix] latest publication states explicitly what is only indicated in general terms in the Memoirs published in 1848 and 1867,—that the lady here described was Miss Brawne. In the earlier Memoirs, three letters to Rice, Woodhouse, and Reynolds follow the long letter to George Keats; then comes the statement that “the lady alluded to in the above pages inspired Keats with the passion that only ceased with his existence”; and, as the letter to Reynolds contains references to a lady, it might have been possible to regard Lord Houghton’s expression as an allusion to that letter only. But in the brief and masterly Memoir prefixed to the Aldine Edition of Keats[3], his Lordship cites the passage from the letter of the 29th of October as descriptive of Miss Brawne,—thus confirming by[xxx] explicit statement what has all along passed current as tradition in literary circles.

When Lord Houghton’s inestimable volumes of 1848 were given to the world there might have been indelicacy in making too close a scrutiny into the bearings of these passages; but the time has now come when such cannot be the case; and I am enabled to give the grounds on which it is absolutely certain that the allusion here was not to Miss Brawne. As Lord Houghton has elsewhere recorded, Keats met Miss Brawne at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Dilke, who had no daughters, while the relationship of “the Misses ——” and “Mrs. ——” of the passage in question is clearly that of mother and daughters. Mrs. Brawne had already been settled with her children at Hampstead for several years at this time, whereas this cousin of “the Misses ——” had just arrived when Keats returned there from Teignmouth. The “Charmian” of this anecdote[xxxi] was an East-Indian, having a grandfather to quarrel with; while Miss Brawne never had a grandfather living during her life, and her family had not the remotest connexion with the East Indies. Moreover, Keats’s sister, who

is still happily alive, assures me positively that the reference is not to Miss Brawne. In regard to the blank for a surname, I had judged from various considerations internal and external that it should be filled by that of Reynolds; and, on asking Mr. Severn (without expressing any view whatever) whether he knew to whom the story related, he wrote to me that he knew the story well from Keats, and that the reference is to the Misses Reynolds, the sisters of John Hamilton Reynolds. Mr. Severn does not know the name of the cousin of these ladies.