The Vagabond

The Vagabond is a timid fellow, and when the path of love has rocks as big as Widener scattered about on it, he seeks consolation in the company of his old friend Keats. After a few lines of drowsy numbness, the world no longer looks so dark. Of late the correspondence to and about Fanny Brawne has taken the place of the sonnets as the cure-all.

"Mrs. Brawne, who took Brown's house for the summer still resides in Hampstead--she is a very nice woman--and her daughter senior is, I think, beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange we have a tiff now and then--she behaves a little better, or I must have sheered off."

Here is where the Vagabond begins to smile when he thinks how far from sheering off friend Keats came.

Two days later Keats describes Fanny again, this time in such detail that the Vagabond can see that hours have been spent watching . . . Fanny has already told him that she's a year younger than she really is . . .

It was more than six months, however, before he wrote to her, and then there is so much taken for granted that the Vagabond feels cheated. Keats has destroyed one letter, written the night before as too sentimental. But already he assumes Fanny's love and she his.

"You have absorbed me. I have a sensation as though I were dissolving . . . I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of seeing you . . . My creed is Love and you are its only tenet."

Mathew Arnold calls these "the love letters of a surgeon's apprentice. They have in them something underbred and ignoble."

Sir Sidney Colvin calls Fanny "careless and unresponsive."

All this makes the Vagabond mad.

Keats left England in 1820, bitter and ready for death. The next year he died, forcing his friends to bury Fanny's letters with him. In them lay Fanny's soul, and without them, Victorians tore her memory to shreds.

What they forgot was that Miss Frances Brawne nearly died soon after Keats; that she mourned him, and cared for his little sister; that it took her twelve years to get over this pink satin romance.

This week-end the Vagabond will spend reading the newly discovered "Letters from Fanny Brawne", which he hopes will make Mathew Arnold look the hidebound fool the Vagabond has always thought him.