In discussing the effect which the Quarterly Review article had on Keats, Medwin[58] quotes the following passages from a communication addressed to him by Fanny Brawne after her marriage:—
“I did not know Keats at the time the review appeared. It was published, if I remember rightly, in June, 1818.[59] However great his mortification might have been, he was not, I should say, of a character likely to have displayed it in the manner mentioned in Mrs. Shelley’s Remains of her husband. Keats, soon after the appearance of the review in question, started on a walking expedition into the Highlands. From thence he was forced to return, in consequence of the illness of a brother, whose death a few months afterwards affected him strongly.
“It was about this time that I became acquainted with Keats. We met frequently at the house of a mutual friend, (not Leigh Hunt’s), but neither then nor afterwards did I see anything in his manner to give the idea that he was brooding over any secret grief or disappointment. His conversation was in the highest degree interesting, and his spirits good, excepting at moments when anxiety regarding his brother’s health dejected them. His own illness, that commenced in January 1820,[60] began from inflammation in the lungs, from cold. In coughing, he ruptured a blood-vessel. An hereditary tendency to consumption was aggravated by the excessive susceptibility of his temperament, for I never see those often quoted lines of Dryden without thinking how exactly they applied to Keats:—
The fiery soul, that working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay.
From the commencement of his malady he was forbidden to write a line of poetry,[61] and his failing health, joined to the uncertainty of his prospects, often threw him into deep melancholy.
“The letter, p. 295 of Shelley’s Remains, from Mr. Finch, seems calculated to give a very false idea of Keats. That his sensibility was most acute, is true, and his passions were very strong, but not violent, if by that term violence of temper is implied. His was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn on himself than on others, and in moments of greatest irritation, it was only by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and wounded his friends. Violence such as the letter describes, was quite foreign to his nature. For more than a twelvemonth before quitting England, I saw him every day, often witnessed his sufferings, both mental and bodily, and I do not hesitate to say that he never could have addressed an unkind expression, much less a violent one, to any human being. During the last few months before leaving his native country, his mind underwent a fierce conflict; for whatever in moments of grief or disappointment he might say or think, his most ardent desire was to live to redeem his name from the obloquy cast upon it;[62] nor was it till he knew his death inevitable, that he eagerly wished to die. Mr. Finch’s letter goes on to say—‘Keats might be judged insane,’—I believe the fever that consumed him, might have brought on a temporary species of delirium that made his friend Mr. Severn’s task a painful one.”
II.
THE LOCALITY OF WENTWORTH PLACE.
The precise locality of Wentworth Place, Hampstead, has been a matter of uncertainty and dispute; and I found even the children of the lady to whom the foregoing letters were addressed without any exact knowledge on the subject. The houses which went to make up Wentworth Place were those inhabited respectively by the Dilke family, the Brawne family, and Charles Armitage Brown; but these were not three houses as might be supposed, the fact being that Mrs. Brawne rented first Brown’s house during his absence with Keats in the summer of 1818, and then Dilke’s when the latter removed to Westminster.