[40] This coupling of Brown’s name with ideas of Fanny’s absence or presence seems to be a curiously faint indication of a painful phase of feeling more fully developed in the sequel. See Letters [XXI], [XXIV], [XXVI], [XXXV], and [XXXVII].
[41] If we are to take these words literally, this letter brings us to the 24th of February, 1820, adopting the 3rd of February as the day on which Keats broke a blood-vessel.
[42] George Keats’s Mother-in-law. The significant but indicates that the absence of Brown was still, as was natural, more or less a condition of the presence of Miss Brawne. That Keats had, however, or thought he had, some reason for this condition, beyond the mere delicacy of lovers, is dimly shadowed by the cold My dear Fanny with which in [Letter XXI] the condition was first expressly prescribed, and more than shadowed by the agonized expression of a morbid sensibility in Letters [XXXV] and [XXXVII]. Probably a man in sound health would have found the cause trivial enough.
[43] The MS. of Lamia, Isabella, &c. (the volume containing Hyperion, and most of Keats’s finest work).
[44] I presume the reference is to Mr. Dilke.
[45] This statement and a general similarity of tone induce the belief that this letter and the preceding one were written about the same time as one to Mr. Dilke, given by Lord Houghton (in the Life, Letters, &c., Vol. II, p. 57), as bearing the postmark, “Hampstead, March 4, 1820.” In that letter Keats cites his friend Brown as having said that he had “picked up a little flesh,” and he refers to his “being under an interdict with respect to animal food, living upon pseudo-victuals,”—just as in [Letter XXV] he speaks to Miss Brawne of his “feeding upon sham victuals.” In the letter to Dilke he says: “If I can keep off inflammation for the next six weeks, I trust I shall do very well.” In [Letter XXV] he expresses to Miss Brawne the hope that he may go out for a walk with her on the 1st of May. If these correspondences may be trusted, we are now dealing with letters of the first week in March, of which period there are still indications in [Letter XXVIII].
[46] The reference to Barry Cornwall and the cold weather indicate that this letter was written about the 4th of March, 1820; for in the letter to Mr. Dilke, with the Hampstead postmark of that date, already referred to ([see page 73]), Keats recounts this same affair of the books evidently as a quite recent transaction, and says he “shall not expect Mrs. Dilke at Hampstead next week unless the weather changes for the warmer.”
[47] Misspelt Proctor in the original.
[48] It is of no real consequence what had been said about “old Mr. Dilke,” the grandfather of the first baronet and the father of Keats’s acquaintance; but it is to be noted that this curious letter might have been a little more self-explanatory, had it not been mutilated. The lower half of the second leaf has been cut off,—by whom, the owners can only conjecture.
[49] The piece cut off the original letter is in this instance so small that nothing can be wanting except the signature,—probably given to an autograph-collector.