At eleven o’clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible; it therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, ‘What is the matter? you are fevered?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ he answered, ‘I was on the outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled,—but now I don’t feel it. Fevered!—of course, a little.’ He mildly and instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my request that he should go to bed. I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and I heard him say,—‘That is blood from my mouth.’ I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet. ‘Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.’ After regarding it steadfastly he looked up in my face, with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said,—‘I know the colour of that blood;—it is arterial blood;—I cannot be deceived in that colour;—that drop of blood is my death-warrant;—I must die.’ I ran for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning, I left him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep.
Keats lived for twelve months longer, but it was only, in his own words, a life in death. Before narrating the end, let us pause and consider his work of the two preceding years, 1818 and 1819, on which his fame as a great English poet is chiefly founded.
[1] Local tradition, I am informed, used to identify the house as one called Eglantine Villa, now demolished. The existing ‘Keats Crescent’ was so named, not as indicating the special neighbourhood where the poet lodged, but only by way of general commemoration of his sojourn.
| —and now his heart Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength Glories—. |
Milton, Par. Lost, i. 581.
[3] Morgan MSS.
