Yourself--your soul--in pity give me all, Withold no atom's atom or I die, Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall. Forget, in the mist of idle misery, Life's purposes,--the palate of my mind Losing its gust, and my ambition blind! And again he cries, what can he do to recover his old liberty?-- When every fair one that I saw was fair, Enough to catch me in but half a snare, Not keep me there: When, howe'er poor or particolour'd things, My muse had wings, And ever ready was to take her course Whither I bent her force, Unintellectual, yet divine to me;-- Divine, I say!--What sea-bird o'er the sea Is a philosopher the while he goes Winging along where the great water throes? How shall I do To get anew Those moulted feathers, and so mount once more Above, above The reach of fluttering Love, And make him cower lowly while I soar? Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism, A heresy and schism, Foisted into the canon law of love;-- No,--wine is only sweet to happy men; More dismal cares Seize on me unawares,-- Where shall I learn to get my peace again? To banish thoughts of that most hateful land, Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life; That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour, Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore, Unown'd of any weedy-haired gods, Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods, Ic'd in the great lakes, to afflict mankind; Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind, Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbag'd meads Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds; There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song, And great unerring Nature once seems wrong. With that image of the sea-bird winging untroubled its chosen way over the waves, and as free as they, the poet sheds a real light on his own psychology in happier days, while the later lines figure direfully the obsession that now seems to make him think of even his friendships as wrecked and darkened, and of love as a ghastly error in nature, no joy but a scourge that blights and devastates. That he might win peace by marriage with the object of his passion does not seem to have occurred to Keats as possible at the present ebb-tide of his fortune. 'However selfishly I feel,' he had written to her some months earlier, 'I am sure I could never act selfishly.' The Brawnes on their part were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly be expected to offer. As the autumn wore into winter, he was not able to disguise his plight from his affectionate companion Brown, though he shrank from speaking of its causes. Looking back upon the time after ten years Brown records the impression it left upon him thus:--