s. "Either that gloom overspread me," so he wrote to James Rice,
"or I was suffering under some passionate feeling, or, if I turned to
versify, that exacerbated the poison of either sensation." He began
taking laudanum at times, but was induced by Brown, towards the end of
1819, to promise to give up this insidious practice. Then came the
crash: it was at Hampstead, on the night of the 3rd of February.

"One night, about eleven o'clock," I quote the words of Lord
Houghton, which have become classical, "Keats returned home[6]
in a state of strange physical excitement; it might have
appeared, to those who did not know him, one of fierce
intoxication. He told his friend [Brown] he had been outside the
stage-coach, had received a severe chill, was a little fevered;
but added: 'I don't feel it now.' He was easily persuaded to go
to bed; and, as he leapt into the cold sheets, before his head
was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and said: 'That is blood
from my mouth. Bring me the candle: let me see this blood.' He
gazed steadfastly some moments at the ruddy stain, and then,
looking in his friend's face with an expression of sudden
calmness never to be forgotten, said: 'I know the colour of that
blood--it is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that colour.
That drop is my death-warrant; I must die.'"

A surgeon arrived shortly, bled Keats, and pronounced the rupture to be
unimportant, but the patient was not satisfied. He wrote to Miss Brawne
some few days afterwards, "So violent a rush of blood came to my lungs
that I felt nearly suffocated." By the 6th of the month, however, he was
already better, and he then said in a letter to his sister: "From
imprudently leaving off my great-coat in the thaw, I caught cold, which
flew to my lungs." Later on he suffered from palpitation of the heart;
but was so far recovered by the 25th of March as to be able to go to
town to the exhibition of Haydon's picture, Christ's Entry into
Jerusalem, and early in April he could take a walk of five miles. In
March he had written that he was then picking up flesh, and, if he could
avoid inflammation for six weeks, might yet do well; in April his doctor
assured him that his only malady was nervous irritability and general
weakness, caused by anxiety and by the excitement of poetry. At an
untoward time for his health, about the first week in May, Keats was
obliged to quit his residence in Hampstead;