“Dark eyes are dearer far
Than orbs that mock the hyacinthine bell”—
has no immediate connexion with Miss Brawne; but it is of interest to note that the colour of her eyes was blue, so that the poet was faithful to his preference. No good portrait of her is extant, except the silhouette of which a reproduction is given [opposite page 3]: a miniature which is perhaps no longer extant is said by her family to have been almost worthless, while the silhouette is regarded as characteristic and accurate as far as such things can be. Mr. Severn, however, told me that the draped figure in Titian’s picture of Sacred and Profane Love, in the Borghese Palace at Rome, resembled her greatly, so much so that he used to visit it frequently, and copied it, on this account. Keats, it seems, never saw this noble picture containing the only satisfactory likeness of Fanny Brawne.
The portrait of Keats which forms the frontispiece to this volume has been etched by Mr. W. B. Scott from a drawing of Severn’s, to which the following words are attached:
“28th Jany. 3 o’clock mg. Drawn to keep me awake—a deadly sweat was on him all this night.”
Keats’s old schoolfellow, the late Charles Cowden Clarke, assured me in 1876 that this drawing was “a marvellously correct likeness.”
Postscript.—During the past ten years my work in connexion with the writings and doings of Keats has involved the discovery and examination of a great mass of documents of a more or less authoritative kind, both printed and manuscript; and many points which were matters of conjecture in 1877 are now no longer so.
Others also have busied themselves about Keats; and, since the foregoing remarks were first published in 1878, Mr. J. G. Speed, a grandson of George Keats, has identified himself with the contributor to the New York World, alluded to at pages [xlviii] and [xlix], in reissuing in America Lord Houghton’s edition of Keats’s Poems, together with a collection of letters.[19] This work, though containing one new letter, unhappily threw no real light whatever either on the inconsistencies of text already referred to or on any other question connected with Keats. Later, Professor Sidney Colvin has issued, with a very different result, his volume on Keats[20] included in the “English Men of Letters” series; and I have not hesitated to use, without individual specification, such illustrative facts as have become available, whether from Mr. Colvin’s work or from my own edition of Keats’s whole writings,[21] which also appeared some time after the publication of the Letters to Fanny Brawne, though years before Mr. Colvin’s book.
Two letters, traced since the body of the present volume passed through the press are added at the close of the series; and I have now reason to think that the letter numbered [XXVIII] should precede that numbered [XXV], the date being probably the 23rd or 25th of February, 1820, rather than the 4th of March as suggested in the foot-note at [page 78].
The cousin of the Misses Reynolds whom Keats described as a Charmian was Miss Jane Cox,[22] at least so I was most positively assured by Miss Charlotte Reynolds in 1883.