Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 30.djvu/291

 'for six weeks he was scarcely ever sober' is scouted by better witnesses. Brown testifies to the poet's occasional use of laudanum, but also to his prompt abandonment of the drug in deference to remonstrance. By Christmas 1819 Keats, having given up work both on the 'Cap and Bells' and the 'Vision,' was writing nothing, and confined almost entirely at home by ill-health. In January 1820 George Keats, whose first speculations in America had failed, paid a flying visit to England in order to extract from Mr. Abbey some of the funds divisible under his grandmother's will after Tom's death. He found John, as he afterwards recorded, 'not the same being; although his reception of me was as warm as heart could wish, he did not speak with his former openness and unreserve; he had lost the reviving custom of venting his griefs.' George left again for Liverpool, 28 Jan., taking with him 700ɭ., of which he undertook to remit to John 200ɭ. as soon as the state of his affairs allowed. On 3 Feb. Keats was seized with the first overt symptoms of consumption, in the shape of an attack of hemorrhage from the lungs, after a cold night-ride outside the coach from London to Hampstead. The scene is vividly described in Brown's manuscript sketch of the poet's life, which has been quoted in Lord Houghton's and other biographies. Extreme nervous prostration followed the attack, and Keats remained a prisoner for six or seven weeks, affectionately nursed by Brown, but forbidden at first to see any one else. With Fanny Brawne, who was still living with her family next door, he kept up a constant interchange of notes during his illness. To his sister, still living under the care of the Abbeys at Walthamstow, and to several friends he wrote also pleasantly and tenderly from his sick bed. By the end of March he began to get about again, and his friends were full of hope for his recovery. Brown started early in May for a second walking tour in Scotland, and Keats having accompanied him as far as Gravesend, returned, not to Hampstead, but to a lodging in Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town, which he had chosen for the sake of being near the Leigh Hunts, who were living in the same district, in Mortimer Street. Here he was able to work a little at seeing through the press the volume of his poems written since 'Endymion,' which he had been persuaded to bring out, and which was published by Messrs. Taylor & Hessey in the beginning of July (1820), under the title 'Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems, by John Keats, Author of "Endymion."'

By the contents of this volume Keats lives as one of the great English poets. They had all been composed in the space of little over a year and a half (March 1818 to October 1819), after the experimental stage of 'Endymion' had been passed through, and before illness and trouble had yet quite unmanned him. Their imaginative range is wide, from the pathos and grimness of 'Isabella' to the elemental majesty of 'Hyperion,' from the glowing romance colour of the 'Eve of St. Agnes' to the classical enchantments of 'Lamia,' and from these to the brooding inwardness of the meditative odes. 'I have loved,' says Keats, 'the principle of beauty in all things,' and again, 'I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever rest upon them.' 'To load every rift of the subject with ore' was his critical advice to Shelley. Charged, even loaded, with beauty as is his mature poetry, it is also singularly free from the sense of strain or effort, and seems to come as naturally (and this again is one of his own critical requirements) 'as the leaves to a tree.' For easy and assured poetic mastery much of his work in this volume stands next in English literature to that of the great Elizabethans from whom he seems lineally descended. Or if, as in 'Hyperion,' he writes rather in the key of Milton, or, as in 'Lamia,' in measures recalling those of Dryden, still it is not as an imitator, but rather as one of a kindred strain and gifts with these classics of the language. The chief English poets after him have been foremost to do him honour. Almost immediately on the appearance of the volume its true value was recognised by such judges as Lamb and Shelley. Leigh Hunt was of course, as usual, cordial and discriminating in its praise. Within a few weeks there appeared also a laudatory article (chiefly on 'Endymion') by Jeffrey in the 'Edinburgh Review.'

But such recognition came too late to give the poet comfort. Fresh hemorrhages occurring on 22 and 23 June gave proof of the progress of his disease, and were followed by an acute aggravation of nervous despondency and weakness. The Hunts took him into their house and nursed him kindly. His unhappy condition is testified by their accounts and that of their visitors, as well as his own despairing letters to Fanny Brawne. In some of these his jealous misery breaks out in suspicions against friends for whom his affection never varied, and of whose loyalty he would never have dreamed of doubting, except in such passing moments of frenzy. The delivery of a letter of Fanny Brawne's