[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

In the summer of 1818, John Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown went on a walking tour of Scotland. It looks like the pair covered somewhere between six hundred to six hundred and fifty miles over forty-four days, so about fifteen miles a day, give or take and accounting for weather.

Keats wrote a series of letters about the journey to his consumptive brother Thomas, unable to travel with what they didn’t know at the time was his last bout with tuberculosis. He brings his brother along in these letters. It’s endearing. He’s colloquial and considerate. Reading, you get the sense he really did “Wish you were here.” You also get the sense that he was entertaining a bedridden friend, and further, the sense that his audience enjoyed laughing at small frustrations.

There’s a great deal about lovely views, divine salt water baths, and all the joys that make for good travel brouchuring, but Keats peppers it with amusing observations; little asides he would give were Thomas along.