h I
rejoice in."

We have seen, in one of Keats's letters to Miss Brawne, that he shrank
from the thought of having their mutual love made known to any of their
friends. But he went further than this. As well after as before he had
fallen in love with Miss Brawne, and had become engaged to her, he could
express a contrary state of feeling. Thus, in addressing Mr. Taylor, on
August 23, 1819, he says: "I equally dislike the favour of the public
with the love of a woman; they are both a cloying treacle to the wings
of independence." And to his brother George, September 17, 1819:
"Nothing strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love.
A man in love, I do think, cuts the sorriest figure in the world. Even
when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it, I could burst out
laughing in his face; his pathetic visage becomes irresistible." The
letters to George, in fact, give no hint of any love for Miss Brawne,
still less of an engagement.

From all these details it would appear that Keats was by no means an
ardent devotee of the feminine type of character. He thought there was
but little congruity between the Ideal and the Real of womanhood. He
parted company, in this regard, with Shakespeare and Shelley, and
adhered rather to Milton. So it was before he was in love; and to be in
love was not the occasion of any essential alteration of view. He
ascribed to Fanny Brawne the same volatile appetite for amusement, the
same propensity for flirtation, the same comparative shallowness of
heart-affection, which he imputed to her sex in general. He loved her
passionately: he believed in her not passionately, nor even intensely.
That he was hard hit by the blind and winged archer was a patent fact;
but he still knew the archer to be blind.

In a room, says Keats's surgical fellow-student, Mr. Stephens, he was
always at the window peering out into space, and it was customary to
call the window-seat "Keats's place." In his last illness he told Severn
that the intensest of his pleasures had been to watch the growth of
flowers; and, after lying quiet one day, he whispered, "I feel the
daisies [or "the flowers"] growing over me." In an early stage of his
fatal illness, February 16, 1820, he had written pathetically to James
Rice: "How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a
sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do
not 'babble,' I think of green fields; I muse with the