[50] This extreme bitterness of feeling must have supervened, one would think, in increased bodily disease; for the letter was clearly written after the parting of Keats and Brown at Gravesend, which took place on the 7th of May, 1819, and on which occasion there is every reason to think that the friends were undivided in attachment. I imagine Keats would gladly have seen Brown within a week of this time had there been any opportunity.
[51] This question may perhaps be fairly taken to indicate the lapse of a month from the time when Keats left the house at Hampstead next door to Miss Brawne’s, at which he probably knew her employments well enough from day to day. If so, the time would be about the first week in June, 1819.
[52] He was seemingly in a different phase of belief from that in which the death of his brother Tom found him. At that time he recorded that he and Tom both firmly believed in immortality. See Life, Letters, &c., Vol. I, p. 246. A further indication of his having shifted from the moorings of orthodoxy may be found in the expression in [Letter XXXV], “I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in:”—not “we believe in.”
[53] This seems to mean that he wrote the letter to the end, and then filled in the words My dearest Girl, left out lest any one coming near him should chance to see them. These words are written more heavily than the beginning of the letter, and indicate a state of pen corresponding with that shown by the words God bless you at the end.
[54] This letter appears to belong between those of the 8th and 25th of July, 1819; and of the two Thursdays between these dates it seems likelier that the 15th would be the one than that the letter should have been written so near the 25th as on the 22nd. The original having been mislaid, I have not been able to take the evidence of the postmark. It will be noticed that at the close he speaks of a weekly exchange of letters with Miss Brawne; and by placing this letter at the 15th this programme is pretty nearly realized so far as Keats’s letters from the Isle of Wight are concerned.
[55] The story in question is one of the many derivatives from the Third Calender’s Story in The Thousand and One Nights and the somewhat similar tale of “The Man who laughed not,” included in the Notes to Lane’s Arabian Nights and in the text of Payne’s magnificent version of the complete work. I am indebted to Dr. Reinhold Köhler, Librarian of the Grand-ducal Library of Weimar, for identifying the particular variant referred to by Keats as the “Histoire de la Corbeille,” in the Nouveaux Contes Orientaux of the Comte de Caylus. Mr. Morris’s beautiful poem “The Man who never laughed again,” in The Earthly Paradise, has familiarized to English readers one variant of the legend.
[56] It will of course be remembered that no such collection appeared until the following summer, when the Lamia volume was published.
[57] I do not find in the present series any letter which I can regard as the particular one referred to in the opening sentence. If [Letter XXXV (p. 93)] were headed Tuesday and this Wednesday, that might well be the peccant document which appears to be missing.
[58] The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. In Two Volumes. London: 1847 (see Vol. II, pp. 86-93).
[59] It appeared in No. XXXVII, headed “April, 1818,” on page 1, but described on the wrapper as “published in September, 1818.”