of you.

to west. A delightful serenity diffused itself through my heart. I worshipped the magnificence and the love of the God of nature, and I thought These two sensations always arise in my heart in the quiet of a rural landscape, and I have often considered it a proof of the purity and the reality of my affection for you, that it always feels most powerful in my religious moments. And this is very natural. Are you not the greatest blessing Heaven has bestowed upon me? Your image attends my rural rambles not only in the healthful walks when, escaped from the clamour of streets and the glare of theatres, I am ready to exclaim with Cowper, "God made the country, and man Imade the town." It is present with me even in the bustle of life; it gives me a distaste to a frivolous and riotous society; it excites me to improve myself in order to deserve your affection, and it quenches the little flashes of caprice and impatience which disturb the repose of existence. If I feel my anger rising at trifles it checks me instantaneously; it seems to say to me, Why do you disturb yourself? Marienne loves you; you deserve her love, and ought to be above these little marks of a little mind." Such is the power of love. I am naturally a man of violent passions, but your affection has taught me to subdue them.

66

Whenever you feel any little inquietudes or impatiences arising in your bosom, think of the happiness you bestow upon me, and real love will produce the same effect on you that it produces on me. No reasoning person ought to marry, who cannot say, 66 My love has made me better, and more desirous of improvement than I was before."

I do not write, I acknowledge, with the best hand in the world, but I endeavour to avoid blots or interpolations. I suppose you guess by this preamble that I am going to find fault with your letters. I would not dare, however, to find fault were I not sure that you would receive my letters cheerfully. You have no false shame to induce you to conceal or deny your faults,- quite the contrary; you think sometimes too much of them, for I know of none which you cannot remedy. Besides, my faithful and attentive affection would induce me to ask with confidence any little sacrifice of your time and care; and as you have done so much for me in correcting the errors of my head you will not feel very unpleasant when I venture to correct the errors of your hand. Now, cannot you sit down on Sunday, my sweet girl, and write me a fair, even-minded, honest hand, unvexed with desperate blots or skulking interlineations? Mind, I do not quarrel with the contents or with the sub

ject; what you tell me of others amuses me, and what you tell me of yourself delights me. It is merely the fashion of your lines; in short, as St. Paul saith, "It is the spirit giveth life, but the letter killeth."

Present my respects to Mrs. Hunter and tell her I have found the tune, the Scotch tune, which pleased her so much between the acts in Douglas ; it belongs to a song called Tweedside, beginning, "What beauties does Flora disclose." I will play it to her when I return. I shall write Mrs. Hunter next week. . . . It is astonishing I should ever be melancholy when I possess friends like these; and when, above all, I am able to tell my dearest Marienne how infinitely she is beloved by her

HENRY.

Keats's Letters to Fanny Brawne.

Among the saddest of sad letters are those of JOHN KEATS to Fanny Brawne. These letters, written under the shadow that impended over the last two years of his life, are touched by the double sadness of love and of death.

He met Fanny Brawne in the fall of 1818, and a little later he wrote to a friend: "I never was in love, and yet the shape of a woman has haunted me these two days. . .. This morning poetry has conquered. I have relapsed into those abstractions that are my only life. I feel escaped

from a new, strange, threatening sorrow, and I am thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality." It is difficult to infer, from what we can find out about Fanny Brawne, whether she was even in beauty the creature that the poet fancied, or whether his ideal was not created bodily out of his own poet's imaginings. That she was shallow-hearted, with sympathies and brain as shallow as her heart, a person with any of the intuitions of sentiment cannot fail to infer from everything that is to be learned of her. What can be said of a woman who, ten years after Keats's death, could write of him to a friend that "the kindest act would be to let him rest forever in the obscurity to which circumstances have condemned him"? -a woman who had neither love enough nor sense enough to guess at the greatness that had stooped so to idealize her; who could speak thus flippantly of a poet whom Matthew Arnold and other critics name to-day in the same breath with Shakespeare, for the debt which is owed him by English poetry.

Keats could not escape the shape that haunted him, whether he would or no. In February, 1819, they were engaged, and for a year he either lived near her so as to see her almost daily, or he wrote her every day such letters as these that follow, — letters in which his passion for her is blended with his passionate sense of beauty and his passionate longing for death. "I have two luxuries to brood over," he writes her, "your loveliness and the hour of my death."

In the winter of 1820 death came near enough for the poet to feel his presence. One night after a slight coughing-fit, feeling his mouth fill with blood, he said, "Bring me the candle," then looked at the blood calmly with an

eye that had been trained by his medical studies to know the symptoms of disease.

"I know the colour of that blood," he said; "it is arterial I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop is my deathYet at that moment, above all "When I felt it possible I might

warrant, I must die."

things, he thought of her. not survive, at that moment I thought of nothing but you. When I said, 'This is unfortunate,' I thought of you." In his lonely and wakeful nights later in his illness, thoughts of her haunted him, mingled with other thoughts, that he had done no immortal work such as he had hoped to do, that he had not made a name to be remembered; only, he adds consolingly to himself, "I have truly loved the spirit of beauty in all things."

In the autumn of 1820 it was decided he should go to Italy, and his faithful friend Severn went with him and remained with him till he died. The letters to Fanny Brawne end with the two which are quoted last in this series, the two he wrote before he went to Italy after their parting; but his letters to his friends are filled with that anguish and longing of the heart that tears him whenever he thinks of her. "I can bear to die; I cannot bear to leave her," he cries. "The very thing I want to live for will be a great occasion of my death.... I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy these pains, which are better than nothing." Again, "Oh that I could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her, to receive a letter from her; to see her handwriting would break my heart. Even to hear of her, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear. Where can I look for consolation or ease? If I had any chance of recovery, this