I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in: Do not write to me if you have done anything this month which it would have pained me to have seen. You may have altered--if you have not--if you still believe in dancing rooms and other societies as I have seen you--I do not want to live--if you have done so I wish the coming night may be my last. I cannot live without you, and not only you, but _chaste you, virtuous you_.... Be serious! Love is not a plaything--and again do not write unless you can do it with a crystal conscience. Poor Keats! Poor Fanny! That Fanny loved Keats is obvious. In this at least she showed herself unworldly. She cannot have been dazzled by his fame, for at that time he was to all appearance merely a minor poet who had been laughed at. He was of humble birth, and he had not even the prospect of being able to earn a living. Add to this that he was an all but chronic invalid. Her love must, in the circumstances, have been a very real and unselfish affair, and there is no evidence to suggest that, for all her taste for dancing and for going into town, it was fickle. Keats asked too much of her. He wished to enslave her as she had enslaved him. He knew in his saner moments that he was unfair to her. “At times,” he wrote, “I feel bitterly sorry that ever I made you unhappy.” There was unhappiness on both sides--the unhappiness of an engagement that could come to nothing. “There are,” as Keats mournfully wrote, “impossibilities in the world.” It was Fate, not Fanny, that wrecked the life of Keats. “My dear Brown,” he wrote near the end, “I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well.” That is not the comment a man makes on a woman whom he regards as his destroying angel. Nor is it a destroying angel that Keats pictures when he writes to Fanny: “You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest. When you passed my window home yesterday, I was filled with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time.” Love such as this is not the enemy of poetry. Without it there would be no poetry but that of patriots, saints and hermits. A biography of Keats should not be a biography without a heroine. That would be _Hamlet_ without Ophelia. Sir Sidney Colvin’s is a masterly life which is likely to take a permanent place in English biographical literature. But it has one flaw. Sir Sidney did not see how vital a clue Keats left us to the interpretation of his life and genius in that last despairing appeal: “My dear Brown, for my sake be her advocate for ever.” VI CHARLES LAMB