[107] The beautiful Ode to Autumn, the draft of which Keats had copied in a letter (unluckily not preserved) written earlier in the same day to Woodhouse.
[108] Sir George Beaumonts and Lord Mulgraves: compare Haydon’s Life and Correspondence.
[109] In the interval between the last letter and this, Keats had tried the experiment of living alone in Westminster lodgings, and failed. After a visit to his beloved at Hampstead, he could keep none of his wise resolutions, but wrote to her, “I can think of nothing else ... I cannot exist without you ... you have absorb’d me ... I shall be able to do nothing—I should like to cast the die for Love or Death—I have no patience with anything else” ... and at the end of a week he had gone back to live next door to her with Brown at Wentworth Place. Here he quickly fell into that state of feverish despondency and recklessness to which his friends, especially Brown, have borne witness, and the signs of which are perceptible in his letters of the time, and still more in his verse, viz. the remodelled Hyperion and the Cap and Bells: see Keats (Men of Letters Series), pp. 180-190.
[110] Referring to the fairy poem of The Cap and Bells, the writing of which, says Brown, was Keats’s morning occupation during these weeks.
[111] Spenser’s Cave of Despair was the subject of the picture (already referred to in Letter CXXIV.) with which Severn won the Royal Academy premium, awarded December 10 of this year.
[112] George Keats had come over for a hurried visit to England on business.
[113] Hemorrhage from the lungs; in which Keats recognised his death-warrant, and after which the remainder of his life was but that of a doomed invalid. The particulars of the attack, as related by Charles Brown, are given by Lord Houghton, and in Keats (Men of Letters Series), p. 193.
[114] Brown having let his house (Wentworth Place) when he started for a fresh Scotch tour on May 7, Keats moved to lodgings at the above address in order to be near Leigh Hunt, who was then living in Mortimer Terrace, Kentish Town.
[115] The Cap and Bells was to have appeared under this pseudonym. By “begin” Keats means begin again (compare above, CXXXVIII.): he did not, however, do so, and the eighty-eight stanzas of the poem which are left all belong to the previous year (end of October—beginning of December 1819).
[116] The volume containing Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, and the Odes.