The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎53r] (110/244)

1892 THE STORY OF GIF FORD 595
that it represents the real state of his feelings. None of the mad
4 agitation' here which Shelley imagined; no symptoms as yet of the
rapture of a blood-vessel!
Following Keats through the rest of his brief life, we still find no
trace of the supposed effects upon him of the brutal treatment of his
Endymion. He had anxieties enough; but they were from quite
other causes.
For the first three months after his return from his Scottish tour
he was in constant and affectionate attendance on the deathbed of his
youngest brother Tom, in whom, at the age of nineteen, the hereditary
family-malady of consumption had for some time shown itself fatally.
He died on the 1st of December, 1818 ; and there can be little doubt
now that those months of close attendance on his deathbed had
aggravated the mischief already done to Keats's own delicate constitu
tion by the overstrained exertions of his Scottish tour. One seems to
see, indeed, that it was by this time, or at this time, and by those
two causes combined, that the taint of the hereditary malady which
had carried off the one brother had been developed in the other to
the point of mortal danger. Henceforth, at all events, we hear at
intervals of ominous recurrences in Keats of the ' sore throat' he had
brought with him from the wet moors of Mull, and become aware
that, though he made light of these recurring illnesses to his friends,
he diagnosed them and their possible portent more and more de-
spondingly, from time to time, in his own private thoughts.
Meanwhile, suppressing such gloomy prognostications, he was
sufficiently busy. Even before End was quite off his hands
he had begun a new and shorter poem in a different vein; in the
course of his Scottish tour he had penned a few scraps of verse, sug
gested by its incidents; during his attendance on his invalid brother
he had sketched, and in part written, his ; and before the
middle of 1819,-—living still at Hampstead, but domesticated now in
the same house there with his bosom-friend Brown,—he had added
to his manuscript stock nearly all his other later poetic pieces of
chief value. A good deal of his leisure was occupied with letter-
writing. His longest and most important letters were to his surviv
ing brother George, who had married some time before, and emigrated
with his wife to America to establish himself in business. More
numerous, but shorter, were those to his only sister, Fanny Keats, a
young girl of sixteen, then living not far from him in an outskirt of
London, but sufficiently far to prevent his seeing her as often as he
would have liked, inasmuch as she was under the guardianship of the
family-trustee, Mr. Abbey, a London tea-merchant, and that gentle
man and his wife were unusually strict in their custody of her. Both
sets of letters are of singular autobiographical interest, not only as
evidence of the strength of Keats's family-affection, but on intellectual
and literary grounds. In this latter respect those to his brother