Chapter I: Front Matter

LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS TO FANNY BRAWNE

Where wert thou mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies
In darkness?

London. Reeves & Turner 1878.

_LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS
TO FANNY BRAWNE
WRITTEN IN THE YEARS
MDCCCXIX AND MDCCCXX
AND NOW GIVEN FROM
THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS
WITH INTRODUCTION
AND NOTES BY
HARRY BUXTON FORMAN_

_LONDON REEVES & TURNER_

_196 STRAND MDCCCLXXVIII_

[_All rights reserved_]

NOTE.

There is good reason to think that the lady to whom the following letters were addressed did not, towards the end of her life, regard their ultimate publication as unlikely; and it is by her family that they have been entrusted to the editor, to be arranged and prepared for the press.

The owners of these letters reserve to themselves all rights of reproduction and translation.

_TO JOSEPH SEVERN, ROME._

_The happy circumstance that the fifty-seventh year since you watched at the death-bed of Keats finds you still among us, makes it impossible to inscribe any other name than yours in front of these letters, intimately connected as they are with the decline of the poet’s life, concerning the latter part of which you alone have full knowledge._

_It cannot be but that some of the letters will give you pain,—and notably the three written when the poet’s face was already turned towards that land whither you accompanied him, whence he knew there was no return for him, and where you still live near the hallowed place of his burial. All who love Keats’s memory must share such pain in the contemplation of his agony of soul. But you who love him having known, and we who love him unknown except by faith in what is written, must alike rejoice in the good hap that has preserved, for our better knowledge of his heart, these vivid and varied transcripts of his inner life during his latter years,—must alike be content to take the knowledge with such alloy of pain as the hapless turn of events rendered inevitable._

_On a memorable occasion it was said of you by a great poet and prophet that, had he known of the circumstances of your unwearied attendance at the death-bed, he should have been tempted to add his “tribute of applause to the more solid recompense which the virtuous man finds in the recollection of his own motives;” and he uttered the wish that the “unextinguished Spirit” of Keats might “plead against Oblivion” for your name. Were any such plea needed, the Spirit to prefer it, then unextinguished, is now known for inextinguishable; and whithersoever the name of “our Adonais” travels, there will yours also be found._

_This opportunity may not unfitly serve to record my gratitude for your ready kindness in affording me information on various points concerning your friend’s life and death, and also for the permission to engrave your solemn portraiture of the beautiful countenance seen, as you only of all men living saw it, in its final agony._

_H. B. F._

CONTENTS.

PAGE

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE v.

TO JOSEPH SEVERN, ROME vii.

INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR xiii.

LETTERS TO FANNY BRAWNE:—

First Period, I to IX, Shanklin, Winchester, Westminster 3

Second Period, X to XXXII, Wentworth Place 43

Third Period, XXXIII to XXXVII, Kentish Town—Preparing for Italy 91

APPENDIX, THE LOCALITY OF WENTWORTH PLACE 111

INDEX 123

Transcriber’s Note: Despite the date on the title page, this is the 1888 edition (see date at end of introduction). The front matter from the prior edition of 1878 seems to have been carried across to this one without being fully checked and updated. This edition doesn’t have an index, and the Appendix about Wentworth Place isn’t on page 111.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

PORTRAIT OF KEATS, DRAWN BY JOSEPH SEVERN AND ETCHED BY
W. B. SCOTT _Frontispiece._

SILHOUETTE OF FANNY BRAWNE, CUT BY EDOUART AND
PHOTO-LITHOGRAPHED BY G. F. TUPPER _Opposite page 3._

FAC-SIMILE OF LETTER XXVII, EXECUTED BY G. I. F.
TUPPER _Opposite page 76._