without any cause, I should be the most sincere of Penitents. I could give way to my repentant feelings now, I could recant all my suspicions, I could mingle with you heart and Soul though absent, were it not for some parts of your Letters. Do you suppose it possible I could ever leave you? You know what I think of myself and what of you. You know that I should feel how much it was my loss and how little yours. My friends laugh at you! I know some of them-when I know them all I shall never think of them again as friends or even acquaintance. My friends have behaved well to me in every instance but one, and there they have become tattlers, and inquisitors into my conduct: spying upon a secret I would rather die than share it with any body's confidence. For this I cannot wish them well, I care not to see any of them again. If I am the Theme, I will not be the Friend of idle Gossips. Good gods what a shame it is our Loves should be so put into the microscope of a Coterie. Their laughs should not affect you (I may perhaps give you reasons some day for these laughs, for I suspect a few people to hate me well enough, for reasons I know of, who have pretended a great friendship for me) when in competition with one, who if he never should see you again would make you the Saint of his memory. These Laughers, who do not like you, who envy you for your Beauty, who would have God-bless'd me from you for ever: who were plying me with disencouragements with respect to you eternally. People are revengeful-do not mind them do nothing but love me if I knew that for certain life and health will in such event be a heaven, and death itself will be less painful. I long to believe in immortality. I shall never be able to bid you an entire farewell. If I am destined to be happy with you A here-how short is the longest Life. I wish to believe in immortality1-I wish to live with you for ever. Do not let my name ever pass between you and those laughers; if I have no other merit than the great Love for you, that were sufficient to keep me sacred and unmentioned in such society. If I have been cruel and unjust I swear my love has ever been greater than my cruelty which last[s] but a minute whereas my Love come what will shall last for ever. If concession to me has hurt your Pride god knows I have had little pride in my heart when thinking of you. Your name never passes my Lips-do not let mine pass yours. Those People do not like me. After reading my Letter you even then wish to see me. I am strong enough to walk over-but I dare not. I shall feel so much pain in parting with you again. My dearest love, I am afraid to see you; I am strong, but not strong enough to see you. Will my arm be ever round you again, and if so shall I be obliged to leave you again? My sweet Love! I am happy whilst I believe your first Letter. Let me be but certain that you are mine heart and soul, and I could die more happily than I could otherwise live. If you think me cruel-if you think I have sleighted you-do muse it over again and see into my heart. My love to you is "true as truth's simplicity and simpler than the infancy of truth" 2 as I think I once said before. How could I 1 He was seemingly in a different phase of belief from that in which the death of his brother Tom found him. At that time he recorded that he and Tom both firmly believed in immortality. See Volume III, page 264. A further indication of his having shifted from the moorings of orthodoxy may be found in the expression in Letter XXXVII, "I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in :"-not “. we believe in." 'No apology is necessary for quoting here the relative passage sleight you? How threaten to leave you? not in the spirit of a Threat to you-no-but 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. Yours for ever my dearest John Keats. from the play so much read by Keats, Troilus and Cressida (Act III, Scene 11) :— O that I thought it could be in a woman— To feed for aye her lamp and flames of love ; Might be affronted with the match and weight How were I then uplifted! but, alas! And simpler than the infancy of truth. My dearest Girl, XXXIX. I do not write this till the last, that no eye may catch it.' 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; every thing 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 1 This seems to mean that he wrote the letter to the end, and then filled in the words My dearest Girl, left out lest any one coming near him should chance to see them. These words are written more heavily than the beginning of the letter, and indicate a state of pen corresponding with that shown by the words God bless you at the end. Probably the tone of this letter may have had something to do with the return of Keats to Wentworth Place instead of Well Walk when the letter-opening affair at Hunt's (pages 92-3) induced him to insist on leaving Kentish Town. It seems likely that this was the last letter Keats ever wrote to Fanny Brawne; for Mr. Severn tells me that his friend was absolutely unable to write to her either on the voyage or in Italy. To her mother, he wrote from Naples the letter given at pages 108-10 of this volume, adding a few pathetic words of farewell to Fanny herself. 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 express'd 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 which you are smiling with. I hate men, and women more. I see nothing but thorns for the future-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 you 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 r 1 See note to The Eve of St. Mark, Volume II, pages 321-2. |