In Sir Charles Dilke’s Memoir of his grandfather, there is a strange passage wherein he quotes from a letter of Miss Brawne’s written ten years after Keats’s death,—a passage which might lead to an inference very far from the truth: “Keats died admired only by his personal friends, and by Shelley; and even ten years after his death, when the first memoir was proposed, the woman he had loved had so little belief in his poetic reputation, that she wrote to Mr. Dilke, ‘The kindest act would be to let him rest for ever in the obscurity to which circumstances have condemned him.’” That Miss Brawne should have written thus at the end of ten years’ widowhood does not by any means imply weakness of belief in Keats’s fame. Obscurity of life is not identical with obscurity of works; and any one must surely perceive that an application made to her for material for a biography, or even any proposal to publish one, must have been intensely painful to her. She could not bear any discussion of him, and was, till her death in 1865, peculiarly reticent about him; but in her latter years, as a matron with grown-up children, when the world had decided that Keats was not to be left in that obscurity, she said more than once that the letters of the poet, which form the present volume, and about which she was otherwise most uncommunicative, should be carefully guarded, “as they would some day be considered of value.” It would be irrelevant to the present purpose to recount the facts of this honoured lady’s life; but one or two personal traits may be recorded. She had the gift of independence or self-sufficingness in a high degree; and it was not easy to turn her from a settled purpose. This strength of character showed itself in a noticeable manner in the great crisis of her life, and in a manner, too, that has to some extent robbed her of the small credit of devotion to the man whose love she had accepted; for those who knew the truth would not have it discussed, and those who decried her did not know the truth. On the news of Keats’s death, she cut her hair short and took to a widow’s cap and mourning. She wandered about solitary, day after day, on Hampstead Heath, frequently alarming the family by staying there far into the night, and having to be sought with lanterns. Before friends and acquaintance she affected a buoyancy of spirit which has tended to wrong her memory; but her sister carried into advanced life the recollection that, when the stress of keeping up appearances passed, Fanny spent such time as she remained at home in her own room,—into which the child would peer with awe, and see the unwedded widow poring in helpless despair over Keats’s letters.