[Footnote 1612: Such cases are not unusual. We personally knew a young lady, a countrywoman of Professor Wilson, afflicted by cancer in the breast, who concealed the disease from her parents lest it should occasion them distress. An operation became necessary; and when the surgeons called for the purpose of performing it, she herself answered the door, received them with a cheerful countenance, led them upstairs to her room, and submitted to the knife; and her parents knew nothing of the operation until it was all over. But the disease had become too deeply seated for recovery, and the noble self-denying girl died, cheerful and uncomplaining to the end. [Footnote 1613: "One night, about eleven o'clock, Keats returned home in a state of strange physical excitement--it might have appeared, to those who did not know him, one of fierce intoxication. He told his friend he had been outside the stage-coach, had received a severe chill, was a little fevered, but added, 'I don't feel it now.' He was easily persuaded to go to bed, and as he leapt into the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed and said, 'That is blood from my mouth; bring me the candle; let me see this blood' He gazed steadfastly for some moments at the ruddy stain, and then, looking in his friend's face with an expression of sudden calmness never to be forgotten, said, 'I know the colour of that blood--it is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop is my death-warrant. I must die!'"--Houghton's LIFE OF KEATS, Ed. 1867, p. 289. In the case of George Wilson, the bleeding was in the first instance from the stomach, though he afterwards suffered from lung haemorrhage like Keats. Wilson afterwards, speaking of the Lives of Lamb and Keats, which had just appeared, said he had been reading them with great sadness. "There is," said he, "something in the noble brotherly love of Charles to brighten, and hallow, and relieve that sadness; but Keats's deathbed is the blackness of midnight, unmitigated by one ray of light!"] [Footnote 1614: On the doctors, who attended him in his first attack, mistaking the haemorrhage from the stomach for haemorrhage from the lungs, he wrote: "It would have been but poor consolation to have had as an epitaph:-- "Here lies George Wilson, Overtaken by Nemesis; He died not of Haemoptysis, But of Haematemesis."] [Footnote 1615: 'Memoir,' p. 427.] [Footnote 171: Jeremy Taylor's 'Holy Living.'] [Footnote 172: 'Michelet's 'Life of Luther,' pp. 411-12.] [Footnote 173: Sir John Kaye's 'Lives of Indian Officers.'] [Footnote 174: 'Deontology,' pp. 130-1, 144.] [Footnote 175: 'Letters and Essays,' p. 67.] [Footnote 176: 'Beauties of St. Francis de Sales.'] [Footnote 177: Ibid.] [Footnote 178: 'Life of Perthes,' ii. 449.] [Footnote 179: Moore's 'Life of Byron,' 8vo. Ed., p. 483.]