rried me to have seen. You may have altered--if you
have not--if you still behave in dancing rooms and other societies
as I have seen you--I do not want to live--if you have done so, I
wish this coming night may be my last. I cannot live without you
and not only you but chaste you; virtuous you. The sun rises and
sets, the day passes, and you follow the bent of your inclinations
to a certain extent--you have no conception of the quantity of
miserable feeling that passes through me in a day--Be serious. Love
is not a plaything--and again do not write unless you can do it
with a crystal conscience. I would sooner die for want of you
than--
"Yours forever,
"J. Keats."

Then I turned back a few pages in my disconnected way of reading this
book, and I found these words: Fannie Brawne to whom this agonized
letter of Keats' was written wrote to a Mr. Dilke ten years after Keats'
death in regard to a memoir proposed to the dead, and in the following
unconcerned and ignorant way:

"The kindest act would be to let him rest forever in the
obscurity to which circumstances have condemned him."

No remembrance here for Keats' adoration; no thrill that a human heart,
even if it had been the heart of an ordinary man, had poured out its
last devotion to hers; no pity for his obscurity, if it was such, his
untimely and tragic death; no recognition of his passion for beauty,
including his misguided passion for the beauty which was not in her; no
perception of the goodness in the man, the bravery of his heart; the
white fire of his spirit; no understanding of his greatness, even after
Byron had written that "Hyperion" was as sublime as AEschylus, and
Shelley had poured out in "Adonais" the grief and the passion of a
flaming indignation and scorn in one of the greatest of elegies; no
memory contemplating the agony of a dying youth stricken with
consumption, and torn with the tragic spectacle of defeated ambition.
"Let him rest forever in the obscurity to which circumstances have
condemned him."--These were her words in the face of all these things.

And so, reading these words of Fanny Brawne, my mind turned back to
Mitch, and his life rose before me and took shape in my mind, and I
wrote; just because he had had this boyhood love for Zueline and went
through that summer of t