attack of hemorrhages and broke a blood vessel. Leigh Hunt found him helpless and took him into his home at Mortimer Terrace.

For a while now the details would be wholly depressing, if there were not a certain grandeur in the spectacle of genius battling against the vampire whose insidious influence was passing from the blood into the brain. The man was beaten-beaten down. Paralyzed with despair he would look for hours from Hunt's window toward Hampstead. His nerves gave way. He burst into floods of tears. His mind became a prey to fixed impressions. He grew suspicious of his best friends. The symptoms are well known in psychopathy. The Brawne letters of this period may be properly judged only by an alienist. To the layman it might seem that the lover had developed into a petulant savage. The imagination begins to rave and rend in darkness. Brown is thought of as an enemy. Those who surround Keats are regarded as inquisitors and tattlers, seeking to do him injury. He thinks of his betrothed as one whose heart is fastened on the world. He accuses her of flirting, begrudges the smiles she gives to others, and makes a morbid demand of her for absolute sacrifice. "You must be mine to die upon the rack if I want you.

For God's sake save me or tell me my passion is of too awful a nature for you." Is it not ironical and significant that the only picture we have of this girl is a black silhouette?

With these torments appears another symptom, — misanthropy and contempt for the brutal world. Her ring on his finger is no talisman. “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 any rest till I get there. . . . I wish I were either in your arms full of faith or that a Thunderbolt would strike me." The distemper comes to a climax when a letter from Miss Brawne, through a servant's negligence, is delivered two days late with a broken seal. In a storm of anger he leaves Hunt's house. Keats is no longer himself. The riotous imagination, now wholly beyond control, is straining to loosen his moorings to a human world and to drag him, perforce, toward the boundaries of Mater Tenebrarum.

Mrs. Brawne took the fugitive into her home and nursed him. Already, knowing his plight, Keats had offered to release Fanny from the engagement. This freedom, be it said to her eternal

205

OF

CALIFORNIA

credit, she promptly refused. The care of mother and daughter quieted him somewhat and exorcised the distemper. But his condition was still wretched. The presence of a stranger gave him a choking sensation. He could not write a note without a tightening of the chest. Meanwhile things were happening in the world to his advantage. The third volume appeared and was fairly well received. Jeffrey published an appreciative criticism of "Endymion" in the "Edinburgh Review." It was too late. Keats was too far gone to be cheered by such things. Haydon's pen sketch from this time is very vivid. He found him “lying in a white bed with white quilt and white sheets; the only color visible was the hectic flush of his cheeks." The doctors, convinced now that another winter in England would bring certain death, ordered him to Italy. Keats prepared to go "as a soldier marches up to a battery." Word was sent to Brown, who hastened home. Shelley's invitation, urging Keats to come to Pisa, was declined. The plan was to put the invalid under the charge of Dr. Clark at Rome. Severn, a young artist, offered to go as companion. Severn let every lover of Keats pause and consecrate a moment of silence to his memory. They sailed from London on September 18.

As the ship went down the Thames, it passed, unawares, the boat that was bringing Brown from Scotland. Contrary winds in the English Channel delayed the voyage many days. Several times the passengers were set ashore for a ramble. After one of these landings — it was off the coast of Dorsetshire - Keats wrote his last lines of verse. In a moment of artistic power he phrased those two paradoxical yearnings upon which, during the previous months, he had brooded with such fluctuating intensity of desire - Love and Death. This last sonnet is one of the perfect swansongs of literature.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art!
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors:
No-yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath
And so live ever or else swoon to death.

XXVIII

IN ROME

As he sailed away the phantom of love found a

freer privilege to haunt and torment the imagination. He thinks of death as a decree of absolute divorce. Yet there is a chivalrous thoughtfulness in the parting messages. From Yarmouth, ten days after leaving London, he wrote Brown, "You think she has many faults but for my sake think she has not one." He cherishes no hope of return, though desire burns with an intensity increasing with the distance. Already he is overwhelmed with the sense of a great darkness coming over him, and in this he sees "her figure eternally vanishing." In this gloom his hope flutters and craves, with blind eyes, a life beyond.

The voyage had its adventures. After the two weeks of slow sailing and anchoring along the English coast, the vessel had to drive through a hard storm for three days in the Bay of Biscay.