' He
was easily persuaded to go to bed, and as he leapt into the cold
sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed and
said, 'That is blood from my mouth; bring me the candle; let me
see this blood' He gazed steadfastly for some moments at the ruddy
stain, and then, looking in his friend's face with an expression
of sudden calmness never to be forgotten, said, 'I know the colour
of that blood--it is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in
that colour; that drop is my death-warrant. I must die!'"
--Houghton's LIFE OF KEATS, Ed. 1867, p. 289.
In the case of George Wilson, the bleeding was in the first
instance from the stomach, though he afterwards suffered from lung
haemorrhage like Keats. Wilson afterwards, speaking of the Lives
of Lamb and Keats, which had just appeared, said he had been
reading them with great sadness. "There is," said he, "something
in the noble brotherly love of Charles to brighten, and hallow,
and relieve that sadness; but Keats's deathbed is the blackness of
midnight, unmitigated by one ray of light!"
(14) On the doctors, who attended him in his first attack, mistaking
the haemorrhage from the stomach for haemorrhage from the lungs,
he wrote: "It would have been but poor consolation to have had
as an epitaph:-
"Here lies George Wilson,
Overtaken by Nemesis;
He died not of Haemoptysis,
But of Haematemesis.
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