There is but little after this in the letter, and apparently no break between the time at which he thus expressed himself and that at which he signed the letter and added—“This is my birthday.” If therefore my conclusion as to the negative value of this and the “Charmian” passage be correct, we may say that he was certainly not enamoured of Miss Brawne up to the 29th of October, 1818, although it is tolerably clear, from the evidence of Mr. Dilke, that Keats first met her about October or November. Again, in a highly interesting and important letter to Keats’s most intimate friend John Hamilton Reynolds, a letter which Lord Houghton placed immediately after one to Woodhouse dated the 18th of December, 1818, we read the following ominous passage suggesting a doom not long to be deferred:— “I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has haunted me these two days—at such a time when the relief, the feverish relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has conquered—I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life—I feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of Immortality. “Poor Tom—that woman and poetry were ringing changes in my senses. Now I am, in comparison, happy.”[5] There is no date to this letter; and, although it was most reasonable to suppose that the fervid expressions used pointed to the real heroine of the poet’s tragedy,—that he wrote in one of those moments of mastery of the intellect over the emotions such as he experienced when writing the extraordinary fifth Letter of the present series,—the fact is that the reference is to “Charmian,” and that the letter was misplaced by Lord Houghton. It really belongs to September 1818, and should precede instead of following this “Charmian” letter. When Keats wrote the next letter in Lord Houghton’s series (also undated) to George and his wife, Tom was dead; and there is another clue to the date in the fact that he transcribes a letter from Miss Jane Porter dated the 4th of December, 1818. After making this transcript he proceeds to draw the following verbal portrait of a young lady: