I can bear to die – I cannot bear to leave her.
And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?
You dazzled me. There is nothing in the world so bright and delicate.
If I am destined to be happy with you here – how short is the longest Life.
To be happy with you seems such an impossibility! it requires a luckier Star than mine! it will never be.
The air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy.
In passing however I must say of one thing that has pressed upon me lately and encreased my Humility and capability of submission and that is this truth – Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect – but they have not any individuality, any determined Character – I would call the top and head of those who have a proper self Men of Power.
My dear girl, I love you ever and ever and without reserve.
I can feel the daisies growing over me.
Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire devotion to you: how much more deeply then must I feel for you knowing you love me. My Mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it. I never felt my Mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment – upon no person but you. When you are in the room my thoughts never fly out of window: you always concentrate my whole senses.
My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving – I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you.
I feel confident I should have been a rebel Angel had the opportunity been mine.
Where are you now? How are the nymphs? I suppose they have led you a fine dance.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.
Knowing well that my life must be passed in fatigue and and trouble, I have been endeavouring to wean myself from you: for to myself alone what can be much of a misery? As far as they regard myself I can despise all events: but I cannot cease to love you.
And must not, it may be asked, all this labour spent upon Keats’ memory and remains, all this load of editing and re-editing and commentary and biography and scholiast-work laid upon a poet who declared that all poems ought to be understood without any comment, – must it not by this time have fairly smothered, or is it not at least in danger of smothering, Keats himself and his poetry?
How horrid was the chance of slipping into the ground instead of into your arms – the difference is amazing Love. Death must come at last; Man must die, as Shallow says; but before that is my fate I fain would try what more pleasures than you have given, so sweet a creature as you can give.
I would have borne it as I would bear death if fate was in that humour: but I should as soon think of choosing to die as to part from you.
How long is this posthumous life of mine to last?
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages.