LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS TO FANNY BRAWNE Where wert thou mighty Mother, when he lay, When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies In darkness? [Illustration: by Joseph Severn 28 Jan^y 1821, 3 O’Clock morn^g] London. Reeves & Turner 1878. _LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS TO FANNY BRAWNE WRITTEN IN THE YEARS MDCCCXIX AND MDCCCXX AND NOW GIVEN FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY HARRY BUXTON FORMAN_ _LONDON REEVES & TURNER_ _196 STRAND MDCCCLXXVIII_ [_All rights reserved_] NOTE. There is good reason to think that the lady to whom the following letters were addressed did not, towards the end of her life, regard their ultimate publication as unlikely; and it is by her family that they have been entrusted to the editor, to be arranged and prepared for the press. The owners of these letters reserve to themselves all rights of reproduction and translation. _TO JOSEPH SEVERN, ROME._ _The happy circumstance that the fifty-seventh year since you watched at the death-bed of Keats finds you still among us, makes it impossible to inscribe any other name than yours in front of these letters, intimately connected as they are with the decline of the poet’s life, concerning the latter part of which you alone have full knowledge._ _It cannot be but that some of the letters will give you pain,—and notably the three written when the poet’s face was already turned towards that land whither you accompanied him, whence he knew there was no return for him, and where you still live near the hallowed place of his burial. All who love Keats’s memory must share such pain in the contemplation of his agony of soul. But you who love him having known, and we who love him unknown except by faith in what is written, must alike rejoice in the good hap that has preserved, for our better knowledge of his heart, these vivid and varied transcripts of his inner life during his latter years,—must alike be content to take the knowledge with such alloy of pain as the hapless turn of events rendered inevitable._