George Keats, with his wife, went to America to try fortune in the new world, and Keats immediately afterward took a long walking tour in the north with his friend Brown. His letters and the few poems of travel he wrote show how ardently he threw himself into this acquaintance with a new phase of nature. But he was to pass through experiences which entered more profoundly into life. In December of the same year, 1818, his brother Tom died. He had been his constant companion and nurse, and was with him at his death. Then, when his whole nature was deeply stirred, he came to know and ardently to love a girl who by turns fascinated and repelled him, until he was completely enthralled, without apparently finding in her the repose which his restless nature needed.
Keats's first mention of Fanny Brawne scarcely prepares one for the inroads made upon him by this personage during the rest of his short life. He went to live with his friend Brown after Tom's death, and Mrs. Brawne became his next-door neighbor. 'She is a very nice woman,' he writes, 'and her daughter senior is I think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange. We have a little tiff now and then—and she behaves a little better, or I must have sheered off.' The passion which he conceived for Miss Brawne rapidly mounted into a dominant place, and it is one of the marks of Keats's deeper nature, not disclosed to his friends, intimate as he was with them, that for the two years which intervened before he left England a dying man, he carried this passion as a sort of vulture gnawing at his vitals, concealed for the most part, though not wholly. Some overt expression it found, as in the 'Ode to Fanny,' the 'Lines to Fanny,' and the verses addressed to the same person beginning:—
'I cry your pity—mercy—love, ay love,'
and it may be traced, with little doubt, in those poems which emphasize his moods, such as the 'Ode to Melancholy' and the sonnet beginning:—
'Why did I laugh to-night?'
and that also beginning:—
'The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone.'
The letters contain infrequent allusions, except of course the posthumously published letters to the lady herself.
But with this overmastering passion to reckon with, the student of Keats can scarcely avoid regarding it as strongly influencing the poet's career during his remaining days. The turbulent experience of death and love acted upon a physical organism predisposed to decay, and soon it was apparent that Keats was himself invaded by the disease of consumption, which had wasted his brother Tom. But before this ravaging of his powers set in, that is, during the first half of 1819, when he was at once deepened by sorrow and excited by love, he wrote that great group of poems which begins with 'The Eve of St. Agnes' and closes with 'Lamia.' If one takes as in some respects the high-water mark of his genius the mystic 'La Belle Dame sans merci,' it is not perhaps too speculative a judgment which sees the keenest anguish of a passionate soul transmuted into terms of impersonal
