It was on the eighth or ninth of August that the smack for London put out from Cromarty with Keats on board, and Brown, having bidden him goodbye, was left to finish the tour alone--'much lamenting,' says he, 'the loss of his beloved companionship at my side.' Keats in some degree picked up strength during a nine days' sea passage, the humours of which he afterwards described pleasantly in a letter to his brother George. But his throat trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really or for any length of time left him afterwards. On the 18th of August he arrived at Hampstead, and made his appearance among his friends the next day, 'as brown and as shabby as you can imagine,' writes Mrs Dilke, '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.' When he found himself seated, for the first time after his hardships, in a comfortable stuffed chair, we are told how he expressed a comic enjoyment of the sensation, quoting at himself the words in which Quince the carpenter congratulates his gossip the weaver on his metamorphosis.
[1] This account was published in _The Plymouth and Devonport Weekly Journal_, beginning October 1, 1840, but was unluckily stopped after the fourth number and carries us no farther than to Ballantrae on the Ayrshire coast. I believe this is the first time that it has been used or quoted.
[2] Does the reader remember how in a similar scene from the other side of the Solway, in Scott's _Redgauntlet_, Dame Martin, leading the dance, 'frisked like a kid, snapped her fingers like castanets, whooped like a Bacchanal, and bounded from the floor like a tennis ball'?
[3] It is interesting to note that the present poet laureate has found something in this piece entitling it to a place in his severely sifted anthology, _The Spirit of Man_.
[4] The words are King Lear's (act v, sc. iii).
[5] This metre is essentially the same as the 'common' measure, eight and six, of the hymn-books, only printed out in single lines to be spoken without--or with only very slight--pause. At the point quoted Keats varies it, whether carelessly or on purpose, and the first lines of three successive couplets, beginning from 'Runnels,' etc., are not in fourteeners but in twelves or Alexandrines (='short measure,' six and six, printed out). A similar variation is frequent in early examples of the metre.