to be a helpmeet make no impression on his consciousness. Those attractions which develop from the interplay of two mated natures are all reduced to one. "Why may I not speak of your Beauty, since without that I never could have lov'd you? I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty." In these letters there is little or no homage to the minor graces which make the wife

A Creature not too bright or good

For human nature's daily food.

Excepting the last sonnet, we usually think of this love as directly provocative of no real poetry. There is an "Ode to Fanny," some "Lines to Fanny," a "Sonnet to Fanny," - all three of no artistic value. They phrase the darker broodings of the letters, the jealousy, the pestering suspicions, the moods of despair. In these byproducts of his imagination he yearns for the early days when his fancy was free. He pictures his present condition in the metaphor of a hateful land, the dungeoner of his friends; a land of wrecked lives, where the winds are icy, the meadows barren and the birds do not sing. He cries to Love for mercy and proclaims himself a wretched thrall. If one makes a composite of this imagery, it is almost impossible to restrain

the belief that he dissolved these personal experiences in some detached mood and brought them forth again, crystallized, in that ballad which all critics agree is beyond criticism. The essential elements are the same. "La Belle Dame sans Merci," hitherto regarded as an isolated trifle, so perfect that it is no longer a trifle, is thus seen to be an autobiographical revelation, concealed by art, of this victim of love. It is the epitome of Keats' own enchantment.1

The artist, not the man, was in love with Fanny Brawne. Those qualities of companionableness which made him so welcome among his friends were not brought into play by her. He actually had to shun her to preserve his poise. The fascination came from the illusion of the imagination which saw in a commonplace girl its own mind-made image of beauty. This is not love in our human sense. It is a psychic fever in the guise of a sublime all-demanding passion. Those outcries of agony, those accesses of jealousy, those struggles to escape, those reactions of devotion, those wild dithyrambic avowals of absolute vassalage, what are they but the concentrated

1 It is possible that the ballad was written prior to the three personal poems. The parallel of imagery is none the less strik

ing.

energies of his poetic life calling for a passion in response equal to his own? It could not be given. The deep was calling unto the shallows. The object of worship was an ordinary woman, — tender, perverse, worldly. Her heart was content with the pleasures of the passing day. Her lover's demands had the hunger of all time and space. He lived in the presence of the eternities. Marriage for them on earth — let us not contemplate that calamity.

Poetry was an antidote for this psychic fever. When Keats, finally shattered in health, could write no more, the fever was free to consume. In one way he was a victim of the universal law of compensation. Nature declares, “You may burn your fires, but you must pay the price for the burning." No profounder truth about the danger of genius was ever uttered than that by Dean Swift: "When a man's imagination gets astride of his reason, all is over with him." Keats forsook the path of the golden mean. He neglected to cultivate the faculties that bring intellectual balance. He reduced life to one principle. Forgetful of the nemesis that lurks in the abnormal, he let his imagination run loose, and it did get astride of his reason. He was young. He was growing slowly into wisdom. Then this unfor

tunate passion for a woman came, then disease, and then the end.

As one thinks of him now, with the fatal fire of imagination in the brain and the fatal fire of consumption in the blood, dwelling yet a little longer in the deepening gloom of hope and unquenchable ambition; as one beholds him, suffering, struggling, reaching out for love, while the shadows gather and the gloom darkens into night, his figure begins to command the terrible pathos of King Lear in the storm; and as love bends over him, pale and lurid in that blackness, with love's eagerness to save, one stands aghast at the implacable irony of his fate. Not love! "O, that way madness lies."

XXVII

INVALID DAYS

THURSDAY, February 3, 1820! It was one of those days of thaw and treacherous weather. Keats left his home in Hampstead without his overcoat. He rode to London on the outside of the stage-coach. Late that night he came home flushed and fevered. Brown, with whom he was living, at Wentworth Place, advised him to go to bed at once. When he entered the bedroom a little later with medicine, Keats was coughing and slipping into the sheets. "That is blood from my mouth," he said. "Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see that blood." In the flickering light he examined the spots on the sheet. He was a graduate in medicine. "I know that blood," he announced. "It is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that color. That drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die." The instantaneous reaction of a man's mind in a crisis which takes him unawares is one of the best tests