Keats’s misfortune in love was a personal misfortune, not a misfortune to his genius. He was too poor to marry, and, in his own phrase, he “trembled at domestic cares.” He was ill and morbid: he had longed for the hour of his death before ever he set eyes on Fanny. Add to this that he was young and sensual and as jealous as Othello. His own nature had in it all the elements of tragic suffering, even if Fanny had been as perfect as St. Cecilia. And she was no St. Cecilia. He had called her “minx” shortly after their first meeting in the autumn of 1818, and described her as “beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange.” Even then, however, he was in love with her. “The very first week I knew you,” he told her afterwards, “I wrote myself your vassal.... If you should ever feel for man at the first sight what I did for you, I am lost.” It is clear from this that his heart and his head quarrelled about Fanny. At the same time, after those first censures, he never spoke critically of her again, even to his most intimate friends. Some of his friends evidently disliked Fanny and wished to separate the lovers. He refers to this in a letter in which he speaks angrily of “these laughers who do not like you, who envy you for your beauty,” and writes of himself as “one who, if he never should see you again, would make you the saint of his memory.” But Keats himself could not be certain that she was a saint. “My greatest torment since I have known you,” he tells her, “has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid.” He is so jealous that, when he is ill, he tells her that she must not even go into town alone till he is well again, and says: “If you would really what is called enjoy yourself at a party--if you can smile in people’s faces, and wish them to admire you _now_--you never have nor ever will love me.” But he adds a postscript: “No, my sweet Fanny--I am wrong--I do not wish you to be unhappy--and yet I do, I must while there is so sweet a beauty--my loveliest, my darling! Good-bye! I kiss you--O the torments!” In a later letter he returns to his jealousy, and declares: “Hamlet’s heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, ‘Go to a nunnery, go, go!’” He tells this fragile little worldly creature that she should be prepared to suffer on the rack for him, accuses her of flirting with Brown, and, in one of the most painful of his letters, cries out: