"One night, about eleven o'clock," I quote the words of Lord Houghton, which have become classical, "Keats returned home[6] 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 [Brown] 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 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.'" A surgeon arrived shortly, bled Keats, and pronounced the rupture to be unimportant, but the patient was not satisfied. He wrote to Miss Brawne some few days afterwards, "So violent a rush of blood came to my lungs that I felt nearly suffocated." By the 6th of the month, however, he was already better, and he then said in a letter to his sister: "From imprudently leaving off my great-coat in the thaw, I caught cold, which flew to my lungs." Later on he suffered from palpitation of the heart; but was so far recovered by the 25th of March as to be able to go to town to the exhibition of Haydon's picture, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, and early in April he could take a walk of five miles. In March he had written that he was then picking up flesh, and, if he could avoid inflammation for six weeks, might yet do well; in April his doctor assured him that his only malady was nervous irritability and general weakness, caused by anxiety and by the excitement of poetry. At an untoward time for his health, about the first week in May, Keats was obliged to quit his residence in Hampstead; as Brown was then leaving for Scotland, and, according to his wont, let the house. Keats accordingly went to live in Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town. A letter which he wrote just before his departure speaks of his uncertain outlook; he might be off to South America, or, more likely, embarking as surgeon on a vessel trading to the East Indies. This latter idea had been in his mind for about a year past, off and on. What he could have contemplated doing in South America is by no means apparent. On the 7th of May Keats parted at Gravesend from Brown, and they never met again. The hand with which he grasped Brown's, and which he had of old "clenched against Hammond's," was now, according to his own words, "that of a man of fifty."