and Brown,
therefore, accompanied George and his bride to Liverpool, and saw them
off. They then started as pedestrians into the Lake country, the land of
Burns, Belfast, and the Western Highlands. Before starting on the trip
Keats had often been in such a state of health as to make it prudent
that he should not hazard exposure to night air; but in his excursion he
seems to have acted like a man of sound and rather hardy physique,
walking from day to day about twenty miles, and sometimes more, and his
various records of the trip have nothing of a morbid or invaliding tone.
This was not, however, to last long; the Isle of Mull proved too much
for him. On the 23rd of July, writing to his brother Tom, he describes
the expedition thus: "The road through the island, or rather track, is
the most dreary you can think of; between dreary mountains, over bog and
rock and river, with our breeches tucked up and our stockings in
hand.... We had a most wretched walk of thirty-seven miles across the
island of Mull, and then we crossed to Iona." In another letter he says:
"Walked up to my knees in bog; got a sore throat; gone to see Icolmkill
and Staffa." From this time forward the mention of the sore throat
occurs again and again; sometimes it is subsiding, or as good as gone;
at other times it has returned, and causes more or less inconvenience.
Brown wrote of it as "a violent cold and ulcerated throat." The latest
reference to it comes in December 1819, only two months preceding the
final and alarming break-down in the young poet's health. In Scotland,
at any rate, amid the exposure and exertion of the walking tour, the
sore throat was not to be staved off; so, having got as far as
Inverness, Keats, under medical advice, reluctantly cut his journey
short, parted from Brown, and went on board the smack from Cromarty. A
nine days' passage brought him to London Bridge, and on the 18th of
August he presented himself to the rather dismayed eyes of Mrs. Dilke.
"John Keats," she wrote, "arrived here last night, as brown and as
shabby as you can imagine: scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn
at the back, a fur cap, a great plaid, and his knapsack. I cannot tell
what he looked like." More ought to be said here of the details of
Keats's Scottish and Irish trip; but such details, not being of
essential importance as incidents in his life, could only be given
satisfactorily in the form of copious extracts from his letters, and for
these-