Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 30.djvu/289

 allowed herself to enter freely into social pleasures and amusements from which his occupations, and presently his health, debarred him. 'She was very fond of admiration. . . she was a flirt. . . she did not seem to care for him,' is the evidence of one who used to frequent her mother's house as a schoolboy during the engagement (see New York Herald, London edit., 12 April 1889). On all other things the most unreserved and intimate of correspondents, Keats says nothing of his love affair in writing either to America or to friends at home.

Meanwhile his time of watching had come to an end. Tom Keats died on 1 Dec. 1818, and immediately afterwards Brown proposed that John, quitting the solitude and melancholy associations of Well Walk, should come and keep house with him at Wentworth Place. This he did, and 'as soon as the consolations of nature and friendship had in some measure alleviated his grief, 'became again immersed in poetry. In December and the first half of January his main work was on 'Hyperion.' On 30 Dec. he copies for his relations in America the two lyrics, 'Bards of Passion and of Mirth,' and 'Ever let the Fancy roam.' In the second half of January he went with Brown for a fortnight's visit in Sussex, first to the house of Dilke's father at Chichester, next to that of Mr. John Snook (Dilke's uncle) at Bedhampton, close by. Here Keats wrote out his famous romantic poem 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' which had apparently been partly composed already, and began the fragmentary 'Eve of St. Mark.' Returning to Wentworth Place early in February, he was idle for a while, and then did not resume work on any long poem, but fell into a new vein, and composed, with no sanguine belief in their success or care for their preservation, several of those meditative odes which have done as much as anything else to give him his high place among English poets. The odes 'On Indolence,' 'On a Grecian Urn,' 'To Psyche,' and 'On a Nightingale' belong certainly, and that 'To Melancholy' in all probability, to the months of March, April, and May in this year. The mood which suggested the first is recorded in prose, under date 19 March, in one of the poet's long journal-letters to his brother and sister-in-law; he transcribes the ode 'To Psyche' for the same correspondents on 30 April; and Brown has told how, in the month of May, he found the poet putting carelessly out of sight behind some books the scraps of paper on which he had been composing the 'Ode to a Nightingale' as he sat in the garden the same morning. This ode was printed, doubtless at the suggestion of Haydon, to whom the poet had recited it as they walked together in the Kilburn meadows, in the 'Annals of the Fine Arts' (edited by J. Elmes) for the following July (1819). Among other literary work of these months was a short review of Reynolds's anticipatory parody of Peter Bell (Examiner, 26 April 1819); the ballad, 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' one of the most perfect of his poems, which he copies with a laughing comment, as if it were nothing at all, for his brother on 28 April; the 'Chorus of Fairies,' for a projected mask or opera, copied in like manner some days later; the sonnet beginning 'Why did I laugh tonight?' (copied 19 March), that beginning 'As Hermes once took to his feathers light' (18 or 19 April), the two on 'Fame,' and that 'To Sleep,' with that beginning 'If by dull rhymes our English must be chained' (all copied 30 April). 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' with the signature 'Canone,' was printed with slight alterations by Leigh Hunt a year after its composition, in the 'Indicator,' 20 May 1820.

During this interval Keats's health and spirits had both been flagging. His throat was never well; he was distractedly in love, with prospects the reverse of hopeful; the critics had brought his name into contempt with all except a small minority of independent judges: and money troubles were beginning to press hard upon him. Of the small fortune which Mr. Abbey held in trust for the orphans, a great part both of his own and his brother Tom's shares had necessarily been anticipated, and difficulties were made about dividing what remained of Tom's share after his death. Another resource, that of certain not inconsiderable legacies left to them direct under their grandfather's will, was untouched, but had to all appearance been forgotten (when these legacies were divided a few years later, they amounted to upwards of 4,500ɭ.) Keats, who had no extravagances of his own, was open-handed to his friends, and had lent upwards of 200ɭ. in various quarters, the latest borrower being the insatiable Haydon; and early in the summer his supplies from Mr. Abbey (whose own affairs a few years later proved to be in disorder) were for the time being stopped altogether in consequence of a lawsuit threatened against that gentleman by the widow of Captain Jennings. Under these circumstances, he thought sometimes of taking lodgings in London and trying to live by journalism, sometimes of giving up literature and either going to practise as a physician in Edinburgh, or else looking out for a berth as surgeon on board an East Indiaman. But Brown, who like all the poet's