Keats evidently, and no wonder, did not like those six lines from 'Tis now free' to 'dance': in transcripts by his friends they are dropped out or inserted only in pencil: but he apparently did not see his way to mend them, and Brown tells us he could never persuade him to finish or resume the poem. In the broken close as he left it there is after all an appropriate abruptness which may content us.
From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his Scottish tour, and especially in this Mull expedition, are to be traced the first distinct and settled symptoms of failure in Keats's health, which by reason of his muscular vigour had to his friends hitherto seemed so robust, and of the development of his hereditary tendency to consumption. In the same letter to his brother Tom which contains the transcript of the Fingal poem he speaks of a 'slight sore throat,'--Brown calls it a violent cold,--which compelled him to rest for a day or two at Oban. Thence they pushed on in broken weather by Ballachulish and the shore of Loch Linnhe to Fort William, and from thence groped and struggled up Ben Nevis, a toilsome climb at best, in a dissolving mist. Once again Keats makes an exceptional endeavour to realise the scene in words for his brother's benefit, telling of the continual shifting and opening and closing and re-opening of the cloud veils about them; and to clench his effect adds, 'There is not a more fickle thing than the top of a Mountain--what would a Lady give to change her headdress as often and with as little trouble?' Seated, so Brown tells us, almost on the edge of a precipice of fifteen hundred feet drop, Keats composed a sonnet, above his worst but much below his best, turning the experience of the hour into a simple enough symbol of his own mental state in face of the great mysteries of things:--
Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist! I look into the chasms, and a shroud Vap'rous doth hide them,--just so much I wist Mankind do know of hell; I look o'erhead, And there is sullen mist,--even so much Mankind can tell of heaven; mist is spread Before the earth, beneath me,--even such, Even so vague is man's sight of himself! Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet,-- Thus much I know that, a poor witless elf, I tread on them,--that all my eye doth meet Is mist and crag, not only on this height, But in the world of thought and mental might!