[2] Unless Brown had transcribed ‘morning’ for ‘moving’ in error; and this was probably the case, though there is a tempting sonority in the juxtaposition of the nearly identical broad vowel sounds in his version.
[3] Reminiscences of a Literary Life, by Charles Macfarlane: London, John Murray, 1917, pp. 12-15.—Keats in his letters is apt enough to talk of cant and flummery, but not of humbug, and I suspect the word, though not the thought, is put into his mouth. With reference to Mr Macfarlane’s account of Keats generally as ‘one of the most cheery and plucky little fellows I ever knew,’ and as a man to have stood with composure a whole broadside of Blackwood and Quarterly articles, and to have faced a battery by the side of any friend, it is difficult to conjecture at what date the writer can have seen enough of Keats to form these impressions. From January 1816, when he was in his seventeenth year, to 1827, young Macfarlane seems to have lived entirely at Naples, except for some excursions to the Levant and a short visit to England in 1820, when Keats was a consumptive patient already starting or started for Italy.
[4] Act v, Sc. iii. See Harrison S. Morris in Bulletin and Review of the Keats-Shelley Memorial, 1913, p. 30.
CHAPTER XVII
EPILOGUE
Hopes and fears at home—Fanny Brawne: Leigh Hunt—Supposed effect of reviews—Shelley misled and inspired—Adonais—A Blackwood Parody—False impressions confirmed—Death of Shelley—Hazlitt and Severn—Brown at Florence—Inscription for Keats’s grave—Severn and Walter Scott—Slow growth of Keats’s fame—Its beginnings at Cambridge—Opinion in the early ‘forties—Would-be biographers at odds—Taylor and Brown: Brown and Dilke—A solution: Monckton Milnes—The old circle: Hunt and Haydon—John Hamilton Reynolds—Haslam, Severn, Bailey—Flaws and slips in Milnes’s work—Its merit and timeliness—Its reception—The Pre-Raphaelites—Rossetti and Morris—The battle won: Later critics—Keats and Shelley—Pitfalls and prejudices—Arnold and Palgrave—Mr. Buxton Forman and others—Latest eulogists—Risks to permanence of fame—His will conquer—Youth and its storms—The might-have-been—Guesses and a certainty.
The friends of Keats at home had in their love for him tried hard after his departure to nurse some sparks of hope for his recovery. John Hamilton Reynolds, answering from Exmouth a letter in which Taylor told him of the poet’s having sailed, wrote, ‘I am very much pleased at what you tell me. I cannot now but hold a hope of his refreshed health, which I confess his residence in England greatly discouraged.... Keats, then, by this is at sea fairly—with England and one or two sincere friends behind him,—and with a warm clime before his face! If ever I wished well to Man, I wish well to him!’ Haslam in a like strain of feeling wrote in December to Severn at Rome:—‘The climate, however, will, I trust, avail him. Keep him quiet, get the winter through; an opening year in Italy will perfect everything. Ere this reaches you, I trust Doctor Clark will have confirmed the most sanguine hopes of his friends in England; and to you, my friend, I hope he will have given what you stand much in need of—a confidence amounting to a faith.... Keats must get himself well again, Severn, if but for us. I, for one, cannot afford to lose him. If I know what it is to love, I truly love John Keats.’ The letters written by Severn to this faithful friend during the voyage and from beside the sick-bed were handed round and eagerly scanned among the circle. Brown, when they came into his hands, used to read passages from them at his discretion to the Brawne ladies next door, keeping the darkest from the daughter by her mother’s wish. Mrs Brawne, evidently believing her child’s heart to be deeply engaged, dealt in the same manner with Severn’s letters to herself. The girl seems to have divined none the less that her lover’s condition was past hope, and her demeanour, according to Brown’s account as follows, to have been human and natural. Keats, writes Brown in a broken style,—
Keats is present to me everywhere and at all times—he now seems sitting by my side and looking hard in my face, though I have taken the opportunity of writing this in company—for I scarcely believe I could do it alone. Much as I have loved him, I never knew how closely he was wound about my heart. Mrs Brawne was greatly agitated when I told her of—and her daughter—I don’t know how—for I was not present—yet she bears it with great firmness, mournfully but without affectation. I understand she says to her mother, ‘I believe he must soon die, and when you hear of his death, tell me immediately. I am not a fool!’