THE END
Printed in Great Britain byR. & R. Clark, Limited,Edinburgh.
Footnotes:
[A]A complete friend. This line sounded very oddly to me at first.
[B]Especially as I have a black eye.
[1]Macmillan’s Magazine, August 1888.
[2]For the letters already printed by Lord Houghton, Mr. Forman as a rule simply copied the text of that editor. The letters to Fanny Brawne and Fanny Keats, on the other hand, he printed with great accuracy from the autographs, and had autographs also before him in revising those to Dilke, Haydon, and several besides. The correspondence with Fanny Keats he kindly gave me leave to use for the present volume, receiving from me in return the right to use my MS. materials for a revised issue of his own work. In that issue, which appeared at the end of 1889, the new matter is, however, printed separately, in the form of scraps and addenda detached from their context; and the present edition (the appearance of which has been delayed for two years by accidental circumstances) is the only one in which the true text of the American and miscellaneous letters is given consecutively and in proper order.
[3]The letters in which I have relied wholly or in part on Mr. Speed’s text are Nos. xxv. lxxx. (only for a few passages missing in the autograph) cxvi. and cxxxi.
[4]Where the dates in my text are printed without brackets, they are those given by Keats himself; the dates within brackets have been supplied either from the postmarks (as was done by Woodhouse in all his transcripts) or by inference from the text.
[5]The autographs of these letters, all except three, are now in the British Museum.
[6]The early letters of Keats are full of these Shakspearean tags and allusions: some of the less familiar I have thought it worth while to mark in the footnotes.
[7]The references are of course to Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, and Haydon. In the sonnet as printed in thePoemsof 1817, and all later editions, the last line but one breaks off at “workings,” the words “in the human mart” having been omitted by Haydon’s advice.
[8]Presumably as shown in some drawing or miniature.
[9]Not the long poem published under that title in 1818, but the earlier attempt beginning, “I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,” which was printed as a fragment in thePoemsof 1817.
[10]This letter, which is marked by Woodhouse in his copy “no date, sent by hand,” I take to be an answer to the commendatory sonnet addressed by Reynolds to Keats on February 27, 1817: seeKeats(Men of Letters Series), Appendix, p. 223.
[11]For Stephano’s “Here’s my comfort,” twice inTempest, II. ii.
[12]
“I’ll not show himWhere the quick freshes are.”Caliban inTempest, III. ii.
[13]This sonnet was first published in theChampion(edited by John Scott) for August 17, 1817.
[14]Charles Cowden Clarke.
[15]For Sunday, May 4, 1817.
[16]The first part, published in the same number of theExaminer, of a ferocious review by Hazlitt of Southey’sLetter to William Smith, Esq., M.P.
[17]The poem so entitled on which Hunt was now at work, and which was published in the volume calledFoliage(1818).
[18]Alluding to the well-known story of Shelley dismaying an old lady in a stage-coach by suddenly,à proposof nothing, crying out to Leigh Hunt in the words of Richard II., “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,” etc.
[19]Opening speech of the King inLove’s Labour’s Lost.
[20]I.e., their likenesses, as introduced by Haydon into his picture of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.
[21]General Bertrand, who followed Napoleon to St. Helena.
[22]On a visit to Benjamin Bailey at Magdalen Hall.
[23]Littlehampton.
[24]Reynolds’s family lived in Little Britain.
[25]William Dilke, a younger brother of Charles Dilke, who had served in the Commissariat department in the Peninsula, America, and Paris. He died in 1885 at the age of 90.
[26]TheRound Table: republished from theExaminerof the two preceding years.
[27]First Lord inAll’s Well that Ends Well, IV. iii.
[28]Bentley, the Hampstead postman, was Keats’s landlord at the house in Well Walk where he and his brothers had taken up their quarters the previous June.
[29]G. R. Gleig, son of the Bishop of Stirling: born 1796, died 1888: served in the Peninsula War and afterwards took orders: Chaplain-General to the Forces from 1846 to 1875: author of theSubalternand many military tales and histories.
[30]Reynolds and Rice.
[31]Sic: for “unpaid”?
[32]
“She disappear’d, and left me dark: I wakedTo find her, or for ever to deploreHer loss, and other pleasures all abjure:When, out of hope, behold her not far off,Such as I saw her in my dream, adorn’dWith what all Earth or Heaven could bestowTo make her amiable.”Paradise Lost, Book VIII.
[33]Charles Wells, a schoolmate of Tom Keats; afterwards author ofStories after NatureandJoseph and his Brethren. For Keats’s subsequent cause of quarrel with him see below, Letter XCII.
[34]An admirable phrase!—if onlypenetraliumwere Latin.
[35]Laon and Cythna, presently changed toThe Revolt of Islam.
[36]The family of Charles Wells lived at this address.
[37]Both in fact appeared in the number for Sunday, January 4: see postscript below.
[38]The Hampstead doctor who attended the Keats brothers.
[39]The text of this letter is described by its American editor (who seems to have mistaken the order of one or two passages) as written in an evident hurry and almost illegible.
[40]Mr. Kingston was a Commissioner of Stamps, an acquaintance and tiresome hanger-on of Wordsworth.
[41]For a more glowing account of this supper party of December 28, 1817, compare Haydon,Autobiography, i. p. 384. The Mr. Ritchie referred to started on a Government mission to Fezzan in September 1818, and died at Morzouk the following November. An account of the expedition was published by his travelling companion, Captain G. F. Lyon, R.N.
[42]The manager: of whom Macready in hisReminiscenceshas so much that is pleasant to say.
[43]Tea-merchant, of Pancras Lane and Walthamstow: guardian to the Keats brothers and their sister.
[44]Of course a mere delusion; but Hunt and those of his circle retained for years afterwards an impression that Scott had in some way inspired or encouraged theCockney Schoolarticles.
[45]Alluding to two sonnets of ReynoldsOn Robin Hood, copies of which Keats had just received from him by post. They were printed in theYellow Dwarf(edited by John Hunt) for February 21, 1818, and again in the collection of poems published by Reynolds in 1821 under the titleA Garden of Florence.
[46]Both theRobin Hoodand theMermaidlines as afterwards printed vary in several places from these first drafts.
[47]Henry Crabb Robinson, author of theDiaries.
[48]The Olliers (Shelley’s publishers) had brought out Keats’sPoemsthe previous spring, and the ill success of the volume had led to a sharp quarrel between them and the Keats brothers.
[49]Georgiana Wylie, to whom George Keats was engaged.
[50]This letter has been hitherto erroneously printed under date September 1818.
[51]Reading doubtful.
[52]The five lines ending here Keats afterwards re-cast, doubtless in order to get rid of the cockney rhyme “ports” and “thoughts.”
[53]“And, sweetheart, lie thou there”:—Pistol (to his sword) inHenry IV., Part 2, II. iv.
[54]Replying to an ecstatic note of Haydon’s about a seal with a true lover’s knot and the initials W. S., lately found in a field at Stratford-on-Avon.
[55]Dentatuswas the subject of Haydon’s new picture.
[56]The famous picture now belonging to Lady Wantage, and exhibited at Burlington House in 1888. Whether Keats ever saw the original is doubtful (it was not shown at the British Institution in his time), but he must have been familiar with the subject as engraved by Vivarès and Woollett, and its suggestive power worked in his mind until it yielded at last the distilled poetic essence of the “magic casement” passage in theOde to a Nightingale. It is interesting to note the theme of the Grecian Urn ode coming in also amidst the “unconnected subject and careless verse” of this rhymed epistle.
[57]Sic: probably, as suggested by Mr. Forman, for “I hope what you achieve is not lost upon me.”
[58]The English rebels against tradition in poetry and art at this time took much the same view of the French dramatists of thegrand siècleas was taken by theromantiquesof their own nation a few years later; and Haydon had written to Keats in his last letter, “When I die I’ll have Shakspeare placed on my heart, with Homer in my right hand and Ariosto in the other, Dante at my head, Tasso at my feet, and Corneille under my ——”
[59]“He hath fought with a Warrener”:—Simple inMerry Wives, I. iv.
[60]The first draught of the proposed preface toEndymion.
[61]Changed in the printed version to—“His image in the dusk she seemed to see.”
[62]The quotation is from Slender inMerry Wives of Windsor, I. i.
[63]Meaning the atmosphere of the little Bentleys in Well Walk.
[64]“I will make an end of my dinner; there’s pippins and cheese to come”:—Sir Hugh Evans inMerry Wives of Windsor, I. ii.
[65]The crossing of the letter, begun at the words “Have you not,” heredipsinto the original writing.
[66]TheOxford Heraldfor June 6, 1818.
[67]Referring probably to the unfortunate second marriage made by their mother.
[68]A leaf with the name and “from the Author,” notes Woodhouse.
[69]Compare the Ode to Psyche:—
“Far, far around shall those dark-crested treesFledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep.”
[70]Wordsworth’s lines “To Joanna” seem to have been special favourites with Keats.
[71]Keats here repeats for his brother the Meg Merrilies piece contained in the preceding letter to Fanny.
[72]Reading doubtful.
[73]Here follows a sketch.
[74]The Swan and Two Necks, Lad Lane, London, seems to have been the coach office for Liverpool and the North-West; compare Lamb’sLetters(ed. Ainger), vol. i. p. 241.
[75]By Long Island Keats means, not of course the great chain of the Outer Hebrides so styled, but the little island of Luing, east of Scarba Sound. His account of the place from which he is writing, and its distance from Oban as specified in the paragraph added there next day, seem to identify it certainly as Kilmelfort.
[76]Cary’s translation.
[77]No place so named appears on any map: but at the foot of the Cruach-Doire-nan-Cuílean, off the road, is a house named Derrynaculan, and a few miles farther on, at the head of Loch Seridain, an ancient fortified site orDun, with an inn on the road near by.
[78]For Loch na Keal.
[79]The six lines from “place” to “dance” were judiciously omitted by Keats in copying these verses later.
[80]Miss Charlotte Cox, an East-Indian cousin of the Reynoldses—the “Charmian” described more fully in Letter LXXIII.
[81]Referring to these words in John Scott’s letter in his defence,Morning Chronicle, October 3, 1818:—“That there are also many, very many passages indicating both haste and carelessness I will not deny; nay, I will go further, and assert that a real friend of the author would have dissuaded him from immediate publication.”
[82]Miss Charlotte Cox; see above, Letter LXX.
[83]This, notes Woodhouse, is in reply to a letter of protest he had written Keats concerning “what had fallen from him, about six weeks back, when we dined together at Mr. Hessey’s, respecting his continuing to write; which he seemed very doubtful of.”
[84]On the death of his brother Tom (which took place December 1, a few hours after the last letter was written) Brown urged Keats to leave the lodgings where the brothers had lived together, and come and live with him at Wentworth Place—a block of two semi-detached houses in a large garden at the bottom of John Street, of which Dilke occupied the larger and Brown the smaller: seeKeats(Men of Letters Series), p. 128. Keats complied; and henceforth his letters dated Hampstead must be understood as written not from Well Walk, but from Wentworth Place.
[85]A paper of the largest folio size, used by Keats in this letter only, and containing some eight hundred words a page of his writing.
[86]This is Keats’s first mention of Fanny Brawne. His sense on first acquaintance of her power to charm and tease him must be understood, in spite of his reticence on the subject, as having grown quickly into the absorbing passion which tormented the remainder of his days.
[87]Of Bedhampton Castle: a connection of the Dilkes and special friend of Brown.
[88]I.e.on George Keats’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Wylie.
[89]The tassels were a gift from his sister-in-law.
[90]The sheet which Keats accidentally left out in making up his packet in the spring, and which he forwarded with this supplement from Winchester the following September, seems to have begun with the words, “On Monday we had to dinner,” etc. (p. 231), and to have ended with the words, “but as I am” (p. 235, line 1): at least this portion of the letter is missing in the autograph now before me. I supply it from Jeffrey’s transcript.
[91]To about this date must belong the posthumously printedOde on Indolence, which describes the same mood with nearly the same imagery. Possibly the “black eye” mentioned by Keats in his footnote, together with the reflections on street-fighting later on, may help us to fix the date of his famous fight with the butcher boy.
[92]Compare the repetition of the same thought and phrase in the odeTo a Nightingalewritten two months later.
[93]Slightly misquoted fromMacbethin the banquet scene.
[94]By mistake for the 19th of March.
[95]For “put together”?
[96]Brown’s younger brothers: see below, p. 245.
[97]
“Sometime am IAll wound with adders, who with cloven tonguesDo hiss me into madness.”Caliban inTempest, II. ii.
[98]This old word for a snack between meals is used by Marlowe and Ben Jonson, and I believe still survives at some of the public schools.
[99]This notice of Reynolds’s parody was printed, with some revision, in theExaminerfor April 26, 1819.
[100]There is no other autograph copy of this famous poem except the draft here given. It contains several erasures and corrections. In verse 3 Keats had written first, for “a lily” and “a fading rose,” “death’s lily” and “death’s fading rose”: in verse 4, for “Meads,” “Wilds”: in verse 7, for “manna dew,” “honey dew”: in verse 8, for “and sigh’d full sore,” “and there she sigh’d”; in verse 11, for “gaped wide,” “wide agape”: and in verse 12, for “sojourn,” “wither.”
[101]Sic: obviously for “run” or “go.”
[102]In all probability theOde to a Nightingale, published in the July number of theAnnals of the Fine Arts, of which James Elmes was editor.
[103]This and the next interpolation are Brown’s.
[104]So copied by Woodhouse: query “battle-axe”?
[105]Keats’s quotation from his first draft of Lamia continued, says Woodhouse, for thirty lines more: but as the text varied much from that subsequently printed, and as Woodhouse’s notes of these variations are lost, I can only give thus much, from an autograph first draft of the passage in the possession of Lord Houghton.
[106]Keats here copies, with slight changes and abridgments, his letter to Tom of July 23, 1818 (see above, p. 147), ending with the lines written after visiting Staffa: as to which he adds, “I find I must keep memorandums of the verses I send you, for I do not remember whether I have sent the following lines upon Staffa. I hope not; ’twould be a horrid bore to you, especially after reading this dull specimen of description. For myself I hate descriptions. I would not send it if it were not mine.”
[107]The beautifulOde to Autumn, the draft of which Keats had copied in a letter (unluckily not preserved) written earlier in the same day to Woodhouse.
[108]Sir George Beaumonts and Lord Mulgraves: compare Haydon’sLifeandCorrespondence.
[109]In the interval between the last letter and this, Keats had tried the experiment of living alone in Westminster lodgings, and failed. After a visit to his beloved at Hampstead, he could keep none of his wise resolutions, but wrote to her, “I can think of nothing else ... I cannot exist without you ... you have absorb’d me ... I shall be able to do nothing—I should like to cast the die for Love or Death—I have no patience with anything else” ... and at the end of a week he had gone back to live next door to her with Brown at Wentworth Place. Here he quickly fell into that state of feverish despondency and recklessness to which his friends, especially Brown, have borne witness, and the signs of which are perceptible in his letters of the time, and still more in his verse, viz. the remodelledHyperionand theCap and Bells: seeKeats(Men of Letters Series), pp. 180-190.
[110]Referring to the fairy poem ofThe Cap and Bells, the writing of which, says Brown, was Keats’s morning occupation during these weeks.
[111]Spenser’s Cave of Despair was the subject of the picture (already referred to in Letter CXXIV.) with which Severn won the Royal Academy premium, awarded December 10 of this year.
[112]George Keats had come over for a hurried visit to England on business.
[113]Hemorrhage from the lungs; in which Keats recognised his death-warrant, and after which the remainder of his life was but that of a doomed invalid. The particulars of the attack, as related by Charles Brown, are given by Lord Houghton, and inKeats(Men of Letters Series), p. 193.
[114]Brown having let his house (Wentworth Place) when he started for a fresh Scotch tour on May 7, Keats moved to lodgings at the above address in order to be near Leigh Hunt, who was then living in Mortimer Terrace, Kentish Town.
[115]TheCap and Bellswas to have appeared under this pseudonym. By “begin” Keats means begin again (compare above, CXXXVIII.): he did not, however, do so, and the eighty-eight stanzas of the poem which are left all belong to the previous year (end of October—beginning of December 1819).
[116]The volume containingLamia,Isabella,The Eve of St. Agnes,Hyperion, and theOdes.
[117]After the attack last mentioned, Keats went to be taken care of in Hunt’s house, and stayed there till August 12.
[118]Chapman’sHomer.
[119]TheMaria Crowtherhad in fact sailed from London September 18: contrary winds holding her in the Channel, Keats had landed at Portsmouth for a night’s visit to the Snooks of Bedhampton.
[120]On the 10th of December following came a renewal of fever and hemorrhage, extinguishing the last hope of recovery: and after eleven more weeks of suffering, only alleviated by the devoted care of Severn, the poet died in his friend’s arms on the 23d of February 1821.