Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 30.djvu/288

, the fatigue and exposure of west highland travel as it was in those days had tried Keats's strength too much, and brought on a throat trouble from which he was never afterwards free. The doctor whom he consulted at Inverness thought badly of his symptoms, and ordered him home at once. He took sail from the port of Cromarty, and after a nine days' passage to London reached Hampstead on 18 Aug. In the meantime letters had been sent to Scotland to recall him on account of the state of his brother Tom's health, which had been fast growing worse during his absence. For the next three months and a half his chief occupation was that of a sick-nurse beside Tom's deathbed. To the strain, intense for one of his strong affections, of watching one brother die, while the other had lately been removed from him by distance, was added the annoyance caused by the insulting criticisms on his work which now appeared, first in 'Blackwood's Magazine' (August 1818), and next in the 'Quarterly Review' (April 1818, not published till September). Bailey had taken occasion to deprecate such treatment of his friend in conversation with Lockhart earlier in the summer; and Taylor is said to have called on Gifford, as editor of the 'Quarterly,' to try and propitiate him before the appearance of 'Endymion.' Such efforts were quite vain against the promptings of party rancour and a natural dislike for the poetical parts of poetry. Both articles, when they appeared, were remarkable even in those days for contemptuous virulence. That in 'Blackwood' (being the fourth of the 'Cockney School Series') has been generally supposed (on grounds of probability not amounting to proof) to be the work of Lockhart; that in the 'Quarterly' was by J. W. Croker (see, Memoir and Correspondence of John Murray, i. 481). Much has been said and written as to the effect of these reviews on the poet's mind and fate. We know from Woodhouse that at the first sting he expressed a momentary purpose of giving up literature and 'trying what good he could do to the world in some other way.' But he very quickly recovered himself, and in his letters gives the attack its true place as 'a mere matter of the moment,' adding, 'I think I shall be among the English poets after my death,' and saying that his own domestic criticism had given him pain without comparison beyond what 'Blackwood' or the 'Quarterly' could inflict. In this manly and dignified temper he remained as long as he was at all himself; but later, after experience of the injury done to his material prospects by such attacks, and when the combined effects of disease, passion, and ill-fortune had unnerved him, there is no doubt that the injustice of the critics must be counted among the other causes of trouble that rankled with cruel effect in his mind. Meantime they procured him in various quarters a good deal of sympathy privately and publicly expressed, including an anonymous present of 25ɭ. from an admirer in the west of England.

From this date (October 1818) begins the series of long journal-letters addressed by Keats jointly to his brother and sister-in-law in America. Writing as the humour seized him, and making up his packet at intervals sometimes of two or three weeks and sometimes of as many months, he strives with affectionate eagerness to prevent their fraternal intimacy being impaired by distance. He did not for any length of time abstain from verse, owning to Woodhouse that almost at the same moment when he declared his intention of giving up poetry he had been meditating on the characters of Saturn and Ops for 'Hyperion.' He began to write that poem in September as a relief from the preoccupations of the sick-room. At the same time he had a presentiment of coming agitations of another kind: 'I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has haunted me these two days; at such a time when the relief, the feverous relief, of poetry seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has conquered; I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life; I feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of immortality.' The attraction towards the lady here alluded to, a friend of the Reynolds's named Miss Charlotte Cox, proved merely transitory, but before many weeks had passed Keats had found his real enslaver in the person of Miss Fanny Brawne, a lively fair-haired girl of seventeen, the eldest daughter of a widow lady who had rented Brown's house at Hampstead during its owner's summer tour in Scotland, and was now living in Downshire Street close by. His first mention of her is when he writes to George in December that he thinks her 'beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable, and strange. We have a little tiff now and then, and she behaves better, or I must have sheered off.' This sentiment of mixed attraction and dislike turned during the winter into engrossing and jealous passion, which brought the poet little joy and much torment during the remainder of his days. The young lady, with her mother's reluctant consent, engaged herself to him, but seems to have had little real appreciation of his gifts, or consideration for his circumstances and temperament, and