The most sanely self-revealing and pleasant passages in the correspondence occur in a letter written in the second week after Keats and Brown had settled at Winchester:—
I see you through a Mist: as I daresay you do me by this time. Believe me in the first Letters I wrote you: I assure you I felt as I wrote—I could not write so now. The thousand images I have had pass through my brain—my uneasy spirits—my unguess’d fate—all spread as a veil between me and you. Remember I have had no idle leisure to brood over you.—’tis well perhaps I have not. I could not have endured the throng of jealousies that used to haunt me before I had plunged so deeply into imaginary interests. I would fain, as my sails are set, sail on without an interruption for a Brace of Months longer—I am in complete cue—in the fever; and shall in these four Months do an immense deal. This Page as my eye skims over it I see is excessively unloverlike and ungallant—I cannot help it—I am no officer in yawning quarters; no Parson-romeo.... ’Tis harsh, harsh, I know it. My heart seems now made of iron—I could not write a proper answer to an invitation to Idalia.... This Winchester is a fine place: a beautiful Cathedral and many other ancient buildings in the Environs. The little coffin of a room at Shanklin is changed for a large room, where I can promenade at my pleasure.... One of the pleasantest things I have seen lately was at Cowes. The Regent in his Yatch (I think they spell it) was anchored opposite—a beautiful vessel—and all the Yatchs and boats on the coast were passing and repassing it; and circuiting and tacking about it in every direction—I never beheld anything so silent, light, and graceful.—As we pass’d over to Southampton, there was nearly an accident. There came by a Boat, well mann’d, with two naval officers at the stern. Our Bow-lines took the top of their little mast and snapped it off close by the board. Had the mast been a little stouter they would have been upset. In so trifling an event I could not help admiring our seamen—neither officer nor man in the whole Boat mov’d a muscle—they scarcely notic’d it even with words. Forgive me for this flint-worded Letter, and believe and see that I cannot think of you without some sort of energy—though mal à propos. Even as I leave off it seems to me that a few more moments’ thought of you would uncrystallize and dissolve me. I must not give way to it—but turn to my writing again—if I fail I shall die hard. O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy—I must forget them.
The old cathedral city of Winchester, with its peaceful closes breathing antiquity, its hurrying limpid chalk-streams and beautiful elm-shadowed meadow walks, and the tonic climate of its surrounding downs, ‘where the air,’ he writes, ‘is worth sixpence a pint,’ exactly suited Keats, and he quickly improved both in health and spirits. The days he spent here, from the middle of August to the second week of October, were the last good days of his life. Working with a steady intensity of application, he managed, as the last extract shows, to steel himself for the time being against the importunity of his passion, although never without a certain feverishness in the effort, and to keep the thought of money troubles at bay by buoying himself up with the firm hope of a stage success. His work continued to be chiefly on Lamia, with the concluding part of Otho, and the beginning of a new tragedy on the story of King Stephen. In the last act of Otho and the opening scenes (which are all he did) of King Stephen he laboured alone, without accepting help from Brown. On the 25th of August he writes to Reynolds, as usual more gravely and openly than to any other correspondent, of his present feelings in regard to life and literature.
The more I know what my diligence may in time probably effect, the more does my heart distend with Pride and Obstinacy[2]—I feel it in my power to become a popular writer—I feel it in my power to refuse the poisonous suffrage of a public. My own being which I know to be becomes of more consequence to me than the crowds of Shadows in the shape of men and women that inhabit a kingdom. The soul is a world of itself, and has enough to do in its own home. Those whom I know already, and who have grown as it were a part of myself, I could not do without: but for the rest of mankind, they are as much a dream to me as Milton’s Hierarchies. I think if I had a free and healthy and lasting organization of heart, and lungs as strong as an ox’s, so as to be able to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation without weariness, I could pass my life very nearly alone though it should last eighty years. But I feel my body too weak to support me to the height, I am obliged continually to check myself, and be nothing.
A letter to his young sister of three days later is in quite another key, but one of wholesome and unforced high spirits:—
The delightful Weather we have had for two Months is the highest gratification I could receive—no chill’d red noses—no shivering—but fair atmosphere to think in—a clean towel mark’d with the mangle and a basin of clear Water to drench one’s face with ten times a day: no need of much exercise—a Mile a day being quite sufficient. My greatest regret is that I have not been well enough to bathe though I have been two Months by the sea side and live now close to delicious bathing—Still I enjoy the Weather—I adore fine Weather as the greatest blessing I can have.... I should like now to promenade round your Gardens—apple-tasting—pear-tasting—plum-judging—apricot nibbling—peach-scrunching—nectarine-sucking and Melon-carving. I have also a great feeling for antiquated cherries full of sugar cracks—and a white currant tree kept for company. I admire lolling on a lawn by a water lillied pond to eat white currants and see gold fish: and go to the Fair in the Evening if I’m good. There is not hope for that—one is sure to get into some mess before evening.
A week later (September 5) he discourses pleasantly to Taylor on the virtues and drawbacks of different kinds of country air and on the effects of field labour on the character; and by way of a specimen of his work sends a passage of thirty lines from Lamia. By this time Brown had gone off to visit friends at Bedhampton and elsewhere, and Keats was left alone at Winchester. Presently came a disturbing letter from George, established by this time at the then remote trading settlement of Louisville, Ohio, and in difficulties from a heavy loss incurred through a venture into which he had been led, dishonestly as he believed, by the naturalist Audubon. He asks in consequence that Abbey should be pressed to send him the share due to him from their brother Tom’s estate. This could only be done if their aunt Jennings could be persuaded to free Abbey’s hands by dropping her threatened Chancery suit. Hurrying to London to try and put this business through, Keats stayed there three days (Septr. 10-13), but dared not break his serenity by sight or touch of his enchantress. In a note to her he writes, ‘I love you too much to venture to Hampstead, I feel it is not paying a visit, but venturing into a fire.... I am a Coward, I cannot bear the pain of being happy, ’tis out of the question; I must admit no thought of it.’ He found few of his friends in town; dined with the Wylies, the family of his sister-in-law; and had much talk with Mr Abbey, who seemed inclined to dangle before him some prospect of employment in the hatter’s business which he combined with his tea-dealing, and read to him with approval a passage from Don Juan (‘Lord Byron’s last flash poem,’ says Keats) against literary ambition. He went to see his sister Fanny at Walthamstow, passed some time with Rice, and had a long six hours’ talk with Woodhouse: of this Keats’s own letters make no mention, but Woodhouse’s account of it, written a week later to Taylor, has been preserved and is curiously interesting.[3]
Keats, warm from the composition of Lamia, had had an impulse to publish it immediately, together with the Eve of St Agnes, but the publishers had thought the time inopportune. Woodhouse asked why not Isabella too? and Keats answered that he could not bear that poem now and thought it mawkish. Whereupon Woodhouse makes the judicious comment: ‘this certainly cannot be so, the feeling is very likely to come across an author on review of a former work of his own, particularly when the object of his present meditations is of a more sober and unimpassioned character. The feeling of mawkishness seems to me that which comes upon us when anything of great tenderness and simplicity is met with when we are not in a sufficiently tender and simple frame of mind to hear it: when we experience a sort of revulsion or resiliency (if there be such a word) from the sentiment or expression.’ Keats, full of Lamia, read it out to his friend, who comments: ‘I am much pleased with it. I can use no other terms for you know how badly he reads his own poetry.’ (Other witnesses on the contrary tell of the thrilling effect of Keats’s reading—a reading which was half chanting, ‘in a low, tremulous undertone’—of his own work.) ‘And you know,’ continues Woodhouse, ‘how slow I am to catch the effect of poetry read by the best reader for the first time.’ Nevertheless he is able to give his correspondent a quite accurate sketch of the plot, and adds, ‘you may suppose all these events have given K. scope for some beautiful poetry, which even in this cursory hearing of it, came every now and then upon me and made me “start, as tho’ a sea-nymph quired.”’
The talk turning to the Eve of St Agnes, Keats showed Woodhouse some changes he had just made in recopying it. One of these introduced a slight but disfiguring note of cynical realism or ‘pettish disgust’ into the concluding lines telling of the deaths of old Angela and the beadsman, and is the first sign we find of that inclination to mix a worldly would-be Don Juanish vein with romance which was soon to appear so disastrously in the Cap and Bells. The other change was to make it clear that the melting of Porphyro into Madeline’s dream, at the enchanted climax of the poem, implied love’s full fruition between them then and there. At this point Woodhouse’s prudery took alarm. He pleaded against the change vehemently, and Keats to tease him still more vehemently defended it, vowing that his own and his hero’s character for virility required the new reading, and that he did not write for misses. The correct and excellent Woodhouse, scandalized though he somewhat was by what he calls his friend’s ‘rhodomontade,’ declares that they had a delightful time together. He was leaving London the same afternoon for Weymouth, and Keats came to the coach-office to see him off. At parting they each promised to mend their ways in the matter of letter-writing, Keats holding out the hope, which was not fulfilled, of a rimed epistle to follow. Woodhouse tells how, being the only inside passenger in the coach, he ‘amused himself by diving into a deep reverie, and recalling all that had passed during the six hours we were tête à tête.’
Such touches of over-sensitive prudery set aside, the more light we get on this friend of Keats, Richard Woodhouse, the higher grows our esteem both for his character and judgment. In other extant letters to Taylor of this date, he comments with fine insight on Keats’s own confessions of secret pride and obstinacy, and on his vice (‘for a vice in a poor man it is’) of lending more than he could afford to friends in need. And what can be more sagacious than the following, from a letter of Woodhouse to a lady cousin of his own?—