A beautiful and touching letter poet John Keats wrote to his lady love Fanny Brawne just a few months before he died will be up for auction at Bonham’s London on March 29th. It is one of only 39 surviving letters from Keats to Brawne that remain in private hands, so the opportunity to purchase one is a rare event. The pre-sale estimate for the letter places its value between £80,000 ($125,000) and £120,000 ($190,000).

When Keats wrote the letter, he was actually living in the same building with Fanny, Wentworth Place in Hampstead Heath, London. He was already very ill with tuberculosis, however, and since both Keats and Fanny had vast personal experience of nursing family members with the disease, they knew they had to stay away from each other lest she run the risk of infection. The letter passionately bemoans their physical separation.

My dearest Fanny

The power of your benediction is not of so weak a nature as to pass from the ring in four and twenty hours – it is like a sacred Chalice once consecrated and ever consecrate. I shall Kiss your name and mine where your Lips have been – Lips! why should such a poor prisoner as I am talk about such things. Thank God, though I hold them the dearest pleasures in the universe, I have a consolation independent of them in the certainty of your affectation. I could write a song in the style of Tom Moores Pathetic about Memory if that would be any relief to me. No. It would not be. I will be as obstinate as a Robin, I will not sing in a cage. Health is my expected heaven and you are the Houri – this word I believe is both singular and plural – if only plural never mind – you are a thousand of them.

Ever yours affectionately my dearest, j.k

Just a few months after he wrote this, in September 1820, John Keats moved to Rome on the advice of his doctors. The warmer climate, they hoped, would stay the progress of the disease and prolong his life. Unfortunately, that was an unseasonably cold and wet autumn in Italy, and his caretakers, his friend Joseph Severn and Dr. James Clark, did more harm than good by bleeding him and starving him (one anchovy and a piece of bread a day), so Keats’ health deteriorated rapidly. Five months later, he was dead.

Fanny mourned him, complete with shorn hair and black clothes, for six years. She kept all the letters he had written her, leaving them to her children when she died in 1865. They published the letters in a slim volume in 1878, then sold the original letters at auction in 1885 for a grand total of £543 17s ($859 in today’s money).

A letter written by Scottish poet Robert Burns to James Gregory, head of Edinburgh University’s medical school, has been discovered in the archives of Floors Castle in Kelso, in the eastern Scottish lowlands known as the Scottish Borders. The letter is dated May 13, 1789, and was discovered by a castle staffer in a 19th century autograph book that belonged to the sixth Duke of Roxburghe.

The discovery was announced just in time for Burns Night (January 25), when Scots everywhere come together to sup on sheep organs boiled in other sheep organs, quaff whisky, sing Burn’s songs and recite his poetry.

The current (tenth) Duke of Roxburghe, Guy Innes-Ker, notes that his ancestor was an avid collector of correspondence and autographs and that the book in which the Burns letter was found also contains an autograph from Charles Dickens. The book contains documents that date back to King Charles I (1600-1649), many of them family records.

The newly discovered letter includes an early draft of one of his most famous poems, “On Seeing a Wounded Hare,” which would be first printed 4 years after the letter. The draft includes a verse that Burns deleted in its entirety before printing, so the letter provides rare new insight into the evolution of the poem. The deleted fourth verse:

Perhaps a mother’s anguish adds its woe
The playful pair crowd fondly by thy side
Ah! helpless nurslings, who will now provide
That life a mother only can bestow!

The Floors Castle staff sent the letter to a variety of Burns experts to authenticate it. They all confirmed it was the real deal.

The document was eventually verified by Professor David Purdie, editor-in-chief of the Burns Encyclopaedia. [..]

Prof Purdie hailed the unearthing of the correspondence, describing it as a “remarkable discovery”.

He said: “Unpublished letters of Robert Burns are extremely rare and this example is doubly interesting as it not only displays the evolution of one of his poems, The Wounded Hare, published in the 1793 Edinburgh Edition of his Poems, but, in Burns and Gregory, it brings together major figures of both the literary and scientific components of the Enlightenment.

“This is the only letter that we know of from Burns to Gregory. Burns rated Gregory as a literary critic. They had met in Edinburgh at the dinner table of Lord Monboddo – one of the great law lords of the 18th century – and got on well.”

In the letter Burns is keen to hear Gregory’s opinion of his work, and tells him to “mark faulty lines with your pencil.” Apparently Gregory’s response was less than effusive in its praise as Burns would write to another friend that “Gregory is a good man, but he crucifies me!”

The poem was inspired by the unsporting shooting of a hare that Burns witnessed during his stay at Ellisland Farm in 1789. A farmer named Thomson shot a hare for gnawing on his father’s garden, wounding her, but not killing her. Burns was so furious about the shot that he threatened to throw Thomson in the river. He didn’t follow through on the threat, but he did fustigate him with blistering poesy.

Ellisland was the inspiration for many of Burns’ works. Even though he lived there just half a year, he wrote over 130 songs and poems while living on the farm, almost a quarter of his oeuvre. He also wrote 230 of the 700 known letters in his lifetime correspondence, and all this while he was actually farming.

The letter will go on display at the castle when it opens to the public this Spring.