But now the hunger is uncontrollable:—

Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all, Withold no atom’s atom or I die, Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall. Forget, in the mist of idle misery, Life’s purposes,—the palate of my mind Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!

And again he cries, what can he do to recover his old liberty?—

When every fair one that I saw was fair, Enough to catch me in but half a snare, Not keep me there: When, howe’er poor or particolour’d things, My muse had wings, And ever ready was to take her course Whither I bent her force, Unintellectual, yet divine to me;— Divine, I say!—What sea-bird o’er the sea Is a philosopher the while he goes Winging along where the great water throes? How shall I do To get anew Those moulted feathers, and so mount once more Above, above The reach of fluttering Love, And make him cower lowly while I soar? Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism, A heresy and schism, Foisted into the canon law of love;— No,—wine is only sweet to happy men; More dismal cares Seize on me unawares,— Where shall I learn to get my peace again? To banish thoughts of that most hateful land, Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand Where they were wreck’d and live a wrecked life; That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour, Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore, Unown’d of any weedy-haired gods, Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods, Ic’d in the great lakes, to afflict mankind; Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind, Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbag’d meads Make lean and lank the starv’d ox while he feeds; There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song, And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.

With that image of the sea-bird winging untroubled its chosen way over the waves, and as free as they, the poet sheds a real light on his own psychology in happier days, while the later lines figure direfully the obsession that now seems to make him think of even his friendships as wrecked and darkened, and of love as a ghastly error in nature, no joy but a scourge that blights and devastates. That he might win peace by marriage with the object of his passion does not seem to have occurred to Keats as possible at the present ebb-tide of his fortune. ‘However selfishly I feel,’ he had written to her some months earlier, ‘I am sure I could never act selfishly.’ The Brawnes on their part were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly be expected to offer. As the autumn wore into winter, he was not able to disguise his plight from his affectionate companion Brown, though he shrank from speaking of its causes. Looking back upon the time after ten years Brown records the impression it left upon him thus:—

It was evident from the letters he had sent me, even in his self-deceived assurance that he was ‘as far from being unhappy as possible,’ that he was unhappy. I quickly perceived he was more so than I had feared; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind, and, frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great uneasiness. He was unwilling to speak on the subject; and I could do no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding that word however.

Brown then tells of his morning and evening work on The Cap and Bells and the revised Hyperion and, in the vague terms I have quoted, of its cessation. And then, seeming to assign to money troubles an even greater part than they really bore in causing Keats’s distress of mind, Brown goes on—

He could not resume his employment, and he became dreadfully unhappy. His hopes of fame, and other more tender hopes were blighted. His patrimony, though much consumed in a profession he was compelled to relinquish, might have upheld him through the storm, had he not imprudently lost a part of it in generous loans.... He possessed the noble virtues of friendship and generosity to excess; and they, in this world, may chance to spoil a man of independent feeling, till he is destitute. Even the ‘immediate cash,’ of which he spoke in the extracts I have given from his letters, was lent, with no hope of its speedy repayment, and he was left worse than pennyless. All that a friend could say, or offer, or urge was not enough to heal his many wounds. He listened, and, in kindness, or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. He was too thoughtful, or too unquiet; and he began to be reckless of health. Among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times, a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spirits. It was discovered by accident, and, without delay, revealed to me. He needed not to be warned of the danger of such a habit; but I rejoiced at his promise never to take another drop without my knowledge; for nothing could induce him to break his word, when once given,—which was a difficulty. Still, at the very moment of my being rejoiced, this was an additional proof of his rooted misery.

Where Brown hints of his being ‘careless of health,’ Haydon, referring apparently to this time of his life in particular, declares roundly and crudely as follows:—

Unable to bear the sneers of ignorance or the attacks of envy, not having strength of mind enough to buckle himself together like a porcupine, and present nothing but his prickles to his enemies, he began to despond, and flew to dissipation as a relief, which after a temporary elevation of spirits plunged him into deeper despondency than ever. For six weeks he was scarcely sober, and—to show what a man does to gratify his appetites, when once they get the better of him—once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the ‘delicious coldness of claret in all its glory,’—his own expression.