In June of the same year Keats set off with his chief intimate, Charles
Armitage Brown (a retired Russia merchant who afterwards wrote a book on
Shakespeare's Sonnets), on a pedestrian tour in Scotland, which extended
into North Ireland as well. In July, in the Isle of Mull, he got a bad
sore throat, of which some symptoms had appeared also in earlier years:
it may be regarded as the beginning of his fatal malady. He cut short
his tour and returned to Hampstead, where he had to nurse his younger
brother Tom, a consumptive invalid, who died in December of the same
year.
At the house of the Dilkes, in the autumn of 1818, Keats made the
acquaintance of Miss Fanny Brawne, the orphan daughter of a gentleman of
independent means: he was soon desperately in love with her, having 'a
swooning admiration of her beauty:' towards the spring of 1819 they
engaged to marry, with the prospect of a long engagement. On the night
of 3 February, 1820, on returning to the house at Hampstead which he
shared with Mr. Brown, the poet had his first attack, a violent one, of
blood-spitting from the lungs. He rallied somewhat, but suffered a
dangerous relapse in June, just prior to the publication of his final
volume, containing all his best poems--_Isabella, Hyperion, the Eve of
St. Agnes, Lamia_, and the leading Odes. His doctor ordered him off, as
a last chance, to Italy; previously to this he had been staying in the
house of Mrs. and Miss Brawne, who tended him affectionately. Keats was
now exceedingly unhappy. His passionate love, his easily roused feelings
of jealousy of Miss Brawne, and of suspicious rancour against even the
most amicable and attached of his male intimates, the general
indifference and the particular scorn and ridicule with which his poems
had been received, his narrow means and uncertain outlook, and the
prospect of an early death closing a painful and harassing illness--all
preyed upon his mind with unrelenting tenacity. The worst of all was the
sense of approaching and probably final separation from Fanny Brawne.
On 18 September, 1820, he left England for Italy, in company with Mr.
Joseph Severn, a student of painting in the Royal Academy, who, having
won the gold medal, was entitled to spend three years abroad for
advancement in his art. They travelled by sea to Naples; reached that
city late in October; and towards the middle of November went on to
Rome. Here Keats received the most constant and kind attention from Dr.
(afterwards Sir James) Clark. But all was of no avail: after continual
and severe suffering, devotedly watched by Severn, he expired on 23
February, 1821. He was buried in the old Protestant Cemetery of Rome,
under a little altar-tomb sculptured with a Greek lyre. His name was
inscribed, along with the epitaph which he himself had composed in the
bitterness of his soul, 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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