At the time when Keats wrote these words he had known Miss Brawne for a couple of months, more or less, having first seen her in October or November at the house of the Dilkes. It might seem that he was about this time in a state of feeling propense to love. Some woman was required to fill the void in his heart. The woman might have been Miss Cox, whom he met in September. As the event turned out, it was not she, but it was Miss Brawne, whom he met in October or November. Fanny Brawne was the elder daughter of a gentleman of independent means, who died while she was still a child; he left another daughter and a son with their mother; and the whole family, as already mentioned, lived at times in the same house which the Dilkes occupied in Wentworth-place, Hampstead, and at other times in the adjoining house, while not tenanted by Brown and Keats. Miss Brawne (I quote here from Mr. Forman) “had much natural pride and buoyancy, and was quite capable of affecting higher spirits and less concern than she really felt. But, as to the genuineness of her attachment to Keats, some of those who knew her personally have no doubt whatever."[5] If so—or indeed whether so or not—it is a pity that she was wont, after Keats’s death, to speak of him (as has been averred) as “that foolish young poet who was in love with me.” That Keats was a poet and a young poet is abundantly true; but that he was a foolish one had even before his death, and especially very soon after it, been found out to be a gross delusion by a large number of people, and might just as well have been found out by his betrothed bride in addition. I know of only one portrait of Miss Brawne; it is a silhouette by Edouart, engraved in two of Mr. Forman’s publications. A silhouette is one of the least indicative forms of portraiture for enabling one to judge whether the sitter was handsome or not. This likeness shows a very profuse mass of hair, a tall, rather sloping, forehead, a long and prominent aquiline nose, a mouth and chin of the petite kind, a very well-developed throat, and a figure somewhat small in proportion to the head. The face is not of the sort which I should suppose to have ever been beautiful in an artist’s eyes, or in a poet’s either; and indeed Keats’s description of Miss Brawne, which I have just cited, is qualified, chilly, and critical, with regard to beauty. Nevertheless, his love-letters to Miss Brawne, most of which have been preserved and published, speak of her beauty very emphatically. “The very first week I knew you I wrote myself your vassal;” “I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you, but beauty;” “all I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your beauty.” It seems probable that Keats was the declared lover of Miss Brawne in April 1819 at the latest—more probably in February; and when his first published letter to her was written, July 1819, he and she must certainly have been already engaged, or all but engaged, to marry. This was contrary to Mrs. Brawne’s liking. They appear to have contemplated—anything but willingly on the poet’s part—a tolerably long engagement; for he was a young man of twenty-three, with stinted means, no regular profession, and no occupation save that of producing verse derided in the high places of criticism. He spoke indeed of re-studying in Edinburgh for the medical profession: this was a vague notion, with which no practical beginning was made. An early marriage, followed by a year or so of pleasuring and of intellectual advancement in some such place as Rome or Zurich, was what Keats really longed for.
We must now go back a little—to December 1818. Haydon was then still engaged upon his picture of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, and found his progress impeded by want of funds, and by a bad attack, from which he frequently suffered, of weakness of eyesight. On the 22nd of the month, Keats, with conspicuous generosity—and although he had already lent nearly £200 to various friends—tendered him any money-aid which might be in his power; asking merely that his friend would claim the fulfilment of his promise only in the last resort. On January 7, 1819, Haydon definitely accepted his offer; and Keats wrote back, hoping to comply, and refusing to take any interest. His own money affairs were, however, at this time almost at a deadlock, controlled by lawyers and by his ex-guardian Mr. Abbey; and the amount which he had expected to command as coming to him after his brother Tom’s death was not available. He had to explain as much in April 1819 to Haydon, who wrote with some urgency. Eventually he did make a small loan to the painter—£30; but very shortly afterwards (June 17th) was compelled to ask for a reimbursement—“do borrow or beg somehow what you can for me.” There was a chancery-suit of old standing, begun soon after the death of Mr. Jennings in 1805, and it continued to obstruct Keats in his money affairs. The precise facts of these were also but ill-known to the poet, who had potentially at his disposal certain funds which remained perdu and unused until two years after his death. On September 20, 1819, he wrote to his brother George in America that Haydon had been unable to make the repayment; and he added, “He did not seem to care much about it, and let me go without my money with almost nonchalance, when he ought to have sold his drawings to supply me. I shall perhaps still be acquainted with him, but, for friendship, that is at an end.” And in fact the hitherto very ardent cordiality between the poet and the painter does seem to have been materially damped after this date; Keats being somewhat reserved towards Haydon, and Haydon finding more to censure than to extol in the conduct of Keats. We can feel with both of them; and, while we pronounce Keats blameless and even praiseworthy throughout, may infer Haydon to have been not greatly blameable.
Towards the end of June 1819 Keats went to Shanklin; his first companion there being an invalid but witty and cheerful friend, James Rice, a solicitor, and his second, Brown, who co-operated at this time with the poet in producing the drama “Otho the Great.” Next, the two friends went to Winchester, “chiefly,” wrote Keats to his sister Fanny, “for the purpose of being near a tolerable library, which after all is not to be found in this place. However, we like it very much; it is the pleasantest town I ever was in, and has the most recommendations of any.” One of his letters from here (September 21) speaks of his being now almost as well acquainted with Italian as with French, and he adds, “I shall set myself to get complete in Latin, and there my learning must stop. I do not think of venturing upon Greek.” It is stated that he learned Italian with uncommon quickness.
Early in the winter which closed 1819 George Keats came over for a short while from America, his main object being to receive his share of the money accruing from the decease of his brother Tom, to the cost of whose illness he had largely contributed. He had been in Cincinnati, and had engaged in business, but as yet without any success. In some lines which John Keats addressed to Miss Brawne in October there is an energetic and no doubt consciously overloaded denunciation of “that most hateful land, dungeoner of my friends, that monstrous region,” &c., &c. John, it appears, concealed from George, during his English visit, the fact that he himself was then much embarrassed in money-matters, and almost wholly dependent upon his friends for a subsistence meanwhile; and George left England again without doing anything for his brother’s relief or convenience. He took with him £700, some substantial part of which appears to have been the property of John, absolutely or contingently; and he undertook to remit shortly to his brother £200, to be raised by the sale of a boat which he owned in America; but months passed, and the £200 never came, no purchaser for the boat being procurable. Out of the £1,100 which Tom Keats had left, George received £440, John hardly more than