For more than the year I am now dwelling on, he had fostered a tender and enduring love for a young girl nearly of his own age, and this love was reciprocal, not only in itself, but in all the worldly advantages arising from it of fortune on her part and fame on his.  It was encouraged by the sole parent of the lady; and the fond mother was happy in seeing her daughter so betrothed, and pleased that her inheritance would fall to so worthy an object as Keats.  This was all well settled in the minds and hearts of the mutual friends of both parties, when poor Keats, soon after the death of his younger brother, unaccountably showed signs of consumption; at least, he himself thought so, though the doctors were widely undecided about it.  By degrees it began to be deemed needful that the young poet should go to Italy, even to preserve his life.  This was at last accomplished, but too late; and now that I am reviewing all the progress of his illness from his first symptoms, I cannot but think his life might have been preserved by an Italian sojourn, if it had been adopted in time, and if circumstances had been improved as they presented themselves.  And, further, if he had had the good fortune to go to America, which he partly contemplated before the death of his younger brother, not only would his life and health have been preserved, but his early fame would have been insured.  He would have lived independent of the London world, which was striving to drag him down in his poetic career, and adding to the sufferings which I consider the immediate cause of his early death.

In Italy he always shrank from speaking in direct terms of the actual things which were killing him.  Certainly the “Blackwood” attack was one of the least of his miseries, for he never even mentioned it to me.  The greater trouble which was ingulfing him he signified in a hundred ways.  Was it to be wondered at, that at the time when the happiest life was presented to his view, when it was arranged that he was to marry a young person of beauty and fortune, when the little knot of friends who valued him saw such a future for the beloved poet, and he himself, with generous, unselfish feelings, looked forward to it more delighted on their account,—­was it to be wondered at, that, on the appearance of consumption, his ardent mind should have sunk into despair?  He seemed struck down from the highest happiness to the lowest misery.  He felt crushed at the prospect of being cut off at the early age of twenty-four, when the cup was at his lips, and he was beginning to drink that draught of delight which was to last his mortal life through, which would have insured to him the happiness of home, (happiness he had never felt, for he was an orphan,) and which was to be a barrier for him against a cold and (to him) a malignant world.

He kept continually in his hand a polished, oval, white carnelian, the gift of his widowing love, and at times it seemed his only consolation, the only thing left him in this world clearly tangible.  Many letters which he was unable to read came for him.  Some he allowed me to read to him; others were too worldly,—­for, as he said, he had “already journeyed far beyond them.”  There were two letters, I remember, for which he had no words, but he made me understand that I was to place them on his heart within his winding-sheet.