d 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.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips.
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
_Ode to Melancholy._

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