which all readers are familiar. Between the 14th and 22nd of February Severn wrote letters to Brown, to Mrs Brawne, and to Haslam to prepare them for the worst and to tell them of the reconciled and tranquil state into which the dying man had fallen. Death came very peacefully at last. On the 23rd of that month, writes Severn, 'about four, the approaches of death came on. 'Severn-I-lift me up—I am dying -I shall die easy; don't be frightened-be firm, and thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept.' Three days later his body was carried, attended by several of the English in Rome who had heard his story, to its grave in that retired and verdant cemetery which for his sake and Shelley's has become a place of pilgrimage to the Englishspeaking world for ever.

CHAPTER XVII

EPILOGUE

Hopes and fears at home-Fanny Brawne: Leigh Hunt-Supposed effect of reviews-Shelley misled and inspired-Adonais-A Blackwood Parody-False impressions confirmed-Death of Shelley-Hazlitt and Severn-Brown at Florence-Inscription for Keats's grave-Severn and Walter Scott-Slow growth of Keats's fame-Its beginnings at Cambridge Opinion in the early 'forties-Would-be biographers at odds-Taylor and Brown: Brown and Dilke-A solution: Monckton Milnes-The old circle: Hunt and Haydon-John Hamilton Reynolds -Haslam, Severn, Bailey-Flaws and slips in Milnes's work-Its merit and timeliness-Its reception-The Pre-Raphaelites-Rossetti and Morris-The battle won: Later critics-Keats and Shelley-Pitfalls and prejudices-Arnold and Palgrave Mr. Buxton Forman and others -Latest eulogists-Risks to permanence of fame-His will conquerYouth and its storms-The might-have-been-Guesses and a certainty.

THE friends of Keats at home had in their love for him tried hard after his departure to nurse some sparks of hope for his recovery. John Hamilton Reynolds, answering from Exmouth a letter in which Taylor told him of the poet's having sailed, wrote, 'I am very much pleased at what you tell me. I cannot now but hold a hope of his refreshed health, which I confess his residence in England greatly discouraged. Keats, then, by this is at sea fairly-with England and one or two sincere friends behind him,-and with a warm clime before his face! If ever I wished well to Man, I wish well to him!' Haslam in a like strain of feeling wrote in December to Severn at Rome:-'The climate, however, will, I trust, avail him. Keep him quiet, get the winter through; an opening year in Italy will perfect everything. Ere

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this reaches you, I trust Doctor Clark will have confirmed the most sanguine hopes of his friends in England; and to you, my friend, I hope he will have given what you stand much in need of a confidence amounting to a faith. . . . Keats must get himself well again, Severn, if but for us. I, for one, cannot afford to lose him. If I know what it is to love, I truly love John Keats.' The letters written by Severn to this faithful friend during the voyage and from beside the sick-bed were handed round and eagerly scanned among the circle. Brown, when they came into his hands, used to read passages from them at his discretion to the Brawne ladies next door, keeping the darkest from the daughter by her mother's wish. Mrs Brawne, evidently believing her child's heart to be deeply engaged, dealt in the same manner with Severn's letters to herself. The girl seems to have divined none the less that her lover's condition was past hope, and her demeanour, according to Brown's account as follows, to have been human and natural. Keats, writes Brown in a broken style,

Keats is present to me everywhere and at all times-he now seems sitting by my side and looking hard in my face, though I have taken the opportunity of writing this in company-for I scarcely believe I could do it alone. Much as I have loved him, I never knew how closely he was wound about my heart. Mrs Brawne was greatly agitated when I told her of-and her daughter-I don't know how-for I was not present-yet she bears it with great firmness, mournfully but without affectation. I understand she says to her mother, 'I believe he must soon die, and when you hear of his death, tell me immediately. I am not a fool!'

As the news grew worse, it seems to have been more and more kept back from her, injudiciously as Brown thought, and in a mutilated letter he gives glimpses of moods in her, apparently hysterical, of alternate forced gaiety and frozen silence. A letter or two which she had written to her dying lover were withheld from him, as we have seen, by reason of the terrible agitation into which the mere sight of her handwriting threw him. We hear in the meantime of her being in close corre

FANNY BRAWNE: LEIGH HUNT

515

spondence with his young sister at Walthamstow. When the news of the end came, Brown writes,-'I felt at the moment utterly unprepared for it. Then she she was to have it told her, and the worst had been concealed from her knowledge ever since your December letter. It is now five days since she heard it. I shall not speak of the first shock, nor of the following days, -it is enough she is now pretty well, and thro'out she has shown a firmness of mind which I little expected from one so young, and under such a load of grief.'

Leigh Hunt had written in these days a letter to Severn which did not reach Rome until after Keats's death. I must quote it as showing yet again the strength of the hold which Keats had on the hearts of his friends, and how he, in a second degree only to Shelley, had struck on something much deeper in Hunt's nature than the sunny, kindly, easy-going affectionateness which was all that in most relations he had to bestow:

Judge how often I thought of Keats, and with what feelings. Mr Brown tells me he is comparatively calm now. If he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it all already, and can put it in better language than any man. I hear he does not like to be told that he may get better, nor is it to be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not thrive. But if this persuasion should happen no longer to be so strong upon him, or if he can now put up with such attempts to console him, remind him of what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour I swear) think always, that I have seen too many cases of recovery from apparently desperate cases of consumption, not to indulge in hope to the very last. If he still cannot bear this, tell him-tell that great poet and noblehearted man that we shall all bear his memory in the most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads to it as our loves do. Or if this will trouble his spirit, tell him that we shall never cease to remember and love him, and that Christian or Infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think that all who are of one accord in mind or heart are journeying to one and the same place, and shall meet somehow or other again, face to face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted. Tell him he is only before us on the road, as he was in everything else; or whether you tell him the latter or no, tell

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him the former, and add, that we shall never forget that he was so, and that we are coming after him. The tears are again in my eyes, and I must not afford to shed them.

During Keats's year of illness and dejection at home, and until the end and after it, the general impression among his friends and acquaintances was that the cause of all his troubles was the agony of mind into which the hostile reviews had thrown him. Severn in the course of his tendance discovered, as we have seen, that this was not so, and learnt the full share which was due to the pangs of unsatisfied, and in a worldly sense hopeless, passion in a consumptive constitution. Brown on his part, although he knew the secret of the heart which Keats so jealously guarded, yet attributed the chief part of his friend's distress to the fear of impending poverty-truly another contributing cause-and conceived a fierce and obstinate indignation against George for having, as he quite falsely imagined, deliberately fleeced his brother, as well as against other friends who had borrowed money from the poet and failed to pay it back. But most of those who knew Keats less intimately, seeing his sudden fall from robustness and high spirits, -having never thought of him as a possible consumptive subject, and being themselves white-hot with anger against Blackwood and the Quarterly, inferred the poet's feelings from their own, and at the same time added fuel to their wrath against the critics, by taking it for granted that it was their cruelty which was killing him.

To no one was this impression conveyed in a more extravagant form than to Shelley, presumably through his friends the Gisbornes. In that letter of remonstrance to Gifford, as editor of the Quarterly, which he drafted in the autumn of 1820 but never sent, Shelley writes:

Poor Keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this review, which I am persuaded, was not written with any intention of producing the effect, to which it has, at least, greatly contributed, of embittering his existence, and inducing a disease from which there are now but faint hopes of his recovery. The first