Loading your reading…

Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne: Written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscriptsKeats, John

General

Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne: Written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscripts

Name: Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne: Written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscripts
Author: Keats, John

Keats, John

Brawne, Fanny, 1800-1865 -- Correspondence; Keats, John, 1795-1821 -- Correspondence; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Correspondence

God bless you.

                                                              J. K.




ADDITIONAL LETTERS.




ADDITIONAL LETTERS.


II _bis_.

                                                           Shanklin

                                                   Thursday Evening

                                                [15 July 1819?[54]]

    My love,

    I have been in so irritable a state of health these two or
    three last days, that I did not think I should be able to
    write this week. Not that I was so ill, but so much so as only
    to be capable of an unhealthy teasing letter. To night I am
    greatly recovered only to feel the languor I have felt after
    you touched with ardency. You say you perhaps might have made
    me better: you would then have made me worse: now you could
    quite effect a cure: What fee my sweet Physician would I not
    give you to do so. Do not call it folly, when I tell you I took
    your letter last night to bed with me. In the morning I found
    your name on the sealing wax obliterated. I was startled at the
    bad omen till I recollected that it must have happened in my
    dreams, and they you know fall out by contraries. You must have
    found out by this time I am a little given to bode ill like
    the raven; it is my misfortune not my fault; it has proceeded
    from the general tenor of the circumstances of my life, and
    rendered every event suspicious. However I will no more trouble
    either you or myself with sad prophecies; though so far I am
    pleased at it as it has given me opportunity to love your
    disinterestedness towards me. I can be a raven no more; you
    and pleasure take possession of me at the same moment. I am
    afraid you have been unwell. If through me illness have touched
    you (but it must be with a very gentle hand) I must be selfish
    enough to feel a little glad at it. Will you forgive me this? I
    have been reading lately an oriental tale of a very beautiful
    color[55]—It is of a city of melancholy men, all made so by
    this circumstance. Through a series of adventures each one of
    them by turns reach some gardens of Paradise where they meet
    with a most enchanting Lady; and just as they are going to
    embrace her, she bids them shut their eyes—they shut them—and
    on opening their eyes again find themselves descending to the
    earth in a magic basket. The remembrance of this Lady and their
    delights lost beyond all recovery render them melancholy ever
    after. How I applied this to you, my dear; how I palpitated
    at it; how the certainty that you were in the same world with
    myself, and though as beautiful, not so talismanic as that
    Lady; how I could not bear you should be so you must believe
    because I swear it by yourself. I cannot say when I shall get
    a volume ready. I have three or four stories half done, but as

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne: Written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscripts

No reviews yet