Of Keats's fondness for wine--his appreciation of it as a flavour grateful to the palate, and to the abstract sense of enjoyment--there are numerous traces throughout his writings. We all remember the famous lines in his "Ode to a Nightingale"--
"Oh for a draught of vintage that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,... Oh for a beaker full of the warm South!" &c.--
lines which seem a little forced into their context, and of which the only tangible meaning there is that the luxury and dreamy inspiration of wine-drinking would relieve the poet's mind from the dull and painful realities of life, and assist his imagination into the dim vocal haunts of the nightingale. There is also in "Lamia" a conspicuous passage celebrating "The happy vintage--merry wine, sweet wine." On claret--as to which we have heard the evidence of Haydon--there is a long tirade in a letter addressed to George Keats and his wife in February 1819. I give it in a condensed form:--
"I never drink above three glasses of wine, and never any spirits and water.... How I like claret! When I can get claret, I must drink it. 'Tis the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in.... It fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness--then goes down cool and feverless: then you do not feel it quarrelling with one's liver.... Other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a man into a Silenus: this makes him a Hermes, and gives a woman the soul and immortality of an Ariadne.... I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I have: I forgot game. I must plead guilty to the breast of a partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a pheasant, and a woodcock _passim_."
At a rather later date, October 1819, Keats had "left off animal food, that my brains may never henceforth be in a greater mist than is theirs by nature." But I presume this form of abstinence did not last long.
I have now gone through the principal points which appear to me to identify Keats as a man, and to throw light upon his character and habits. He entered on life high-spirited, ardent, impulsive, vehement; with plenty of self-confidence, ballasted with a large capacity (though he did not always exercise it to a practical result) for self-criticism; longing to be a poet, and firmly believing that he could and would be one; resolute to be a man--unselfish, kindly, and generous. But, though kindly, he was irritable; though unselfish and generous, wilful and suspicious. An affront was what he would not bear; and, when he found himself affronted in a form--that of press ridicule and detraction--which could not be resented in person, nor readily retaliated in any way, it is abundantly probable that the indignity preyed upon his mind and spirits, and contributed to embitter the days cut short by disease, the messenger of despair to that passionate love which had become the single intense interest of his life. The single intense interest, along with poetry--both of them hurrying without fruition to the grave. Keats seems to me to have been naturally a man of complex character, many-mooded, with a tendency to perverse self-conflict. The circumstances of his brief career--his poetic ambition, his want of any definite employment, his association with men of literary occupation or taste whom he only half approved, the critical venom poured forth against him, his love thwarted by a mortal malady--all these things tended to bring out the unruly or morbid, and to deplete the many fine and solid, elements in his nature. With the personal character of Keats, as with his writings, we may perhaps deal most fairly by saying that his outburst and his reserve of faculty were such that, in the narrow space allotted to him, youth had not advanced far enough to disentangle the rich and various material. But his latest years, which enabled his poetry to find full and deathless voice, were so loaded with suffering and perturbation as to leave the character less lucidly and harmoniously developed than even in the days of adolescence. From "Endymion" to "Lamia" and the "Eve of St. Mark," we have, in poetry, advanced greatly towards the radiant meridian: in life, from 1818 to 1821, we have receded to a baffling dusk.