For more than the year I am now dwelling on, he had fostered a tender
and enduring love for a young girl nearly of his own age, and this love
was reciprocal, not only in itself, but in all the worldly advantages
arising from it of fortune on her part and fame on his. It was
encouraged by the sole parent of the lady; and the fond mother was happy
in seeing her daughter so betrothed, and pleased that her inheritance
would fall to so worthy an object as Keats. This was all well settled in
the minds and hearts of the mutual friends of both parties, when poor
Keats, soon after the death of his younger brother, unaccountably showed
signs of consumption; at least, he himself thought so, though the
doctors were widely undecided about it. By degrees it began to be deemed
needful that the young poet should go to Italy, even to preserve his
life. This was at last accomplished, but too late; and now that I am
reviewing all the progress of his illness from his first symptoms,
I cannot but think his life might have been preserved by an Italian
sojourn, if it had been adopted in time, and if circumstances had been
improved as they presented themselves. And, further, if he had had the
good fortune to go to America, which he partly contemplated before the
death of his younger brother, not only would his life and health have
been preserved, but his early fame would have been insured. He would
have lived independent of the London world, which was striving to drag
him down in his poetic career, and adding to the sufferings which I
consider the immediate cause of his early death.

In Italy he always shrank from speaking in direct terms of the actual
things which were killing him. Certainly the "Blackwood" attack was one
of the least of his miseries, for he never even mentioned it to me. The
greater trouble which was ingulfing him he signified in a hundred ways.
Was it to be wondered at, that at the time when the happiest life was
presented to his view, when it was arranged that he was to marry a young