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The poet is recalled from these rapturous flights to the fugitive sweetness of the present: he is wandering in May meadows, young and impetuous, on fire with hopes, and his heart's beloved beside him. It is almost too good to be true. "I have never known any unalloyed happiness for many days together," he tells Fanny; "the death or sickness of someone has always spoilt my home. I almost wish we were butterflies, and lived but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain." He talks to her earnestly of his dreams, his aspirations, his ambitions: and then the sordid facts of every-day life begin to cast a blighting shadow over his effulgent hopes. What has he, indeed, to offer, worth her taking? A young man of twenty-three, ex-dresser at a hospital, who has abandoned his surgical career without adopting any other: with slender resources, and no occupation beyond that of producing verses which are held up to absolute derision by the great reviews. "I would willingly have recourse to other means," he tells her again, as he has told his friend Dilke, "I cannot: I am fit for nothing else but literature." He talks of taking up journalism—but in his heart he feels unfit for any regular profession, by reason both of physical weakness and a certain lack of system in mental work. The future becomes blackly, blankly overcast; the res augusta domi descend like a curtain between the sublimity of Keats and the calm commonsense of Fanny. They turn homewards in silence, the poet revolving melancholy musings.

Fanny Brawne enters her mother's house, and John Keats goes into his room and sits down, brooding, brooding. "O," he says, "that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers! Then I might hope—but despair is forced upon me as a habit." And he is only too well aware, that although he is naturally "the very soul of courage and manliness," this habit of despair is growing upon him, and eating his energy away. A wintry chill settles down upon the May-time, and his misery finds vent in lovely lines—

Painting by W. J. Neatby.   ENDYMION. Click to ENLARGE

Yet Keats is young, and youth means buoyancy. With an effort—increasingly difficult—he is able to shake off this sombre fit for awhile; and he makes use of the simplest means to that end. "Whenever I feel vapourish," he has said, "I rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt; brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings neatly, and in fact adonize as if I were going out: then, all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write." These very prosaic methods adopted, he abandons himself to the full flood of