I

His mind is in a state of peace, from the final leave he has taken of this world, and all its future hopes. light the fire, make his breakfast, and sometimes am obliged to cook; make his bed, and even sweep the room. . . Oh I would my unfortunate friend had never left your Wentworth Place for the hopeless advantages of this comfortless Italy! He has many many times talked over 'the few happy days at your house, the only time when his mind was at ease'. . . . Poor Keats cannot see any letters—at least he will not; they affect him so much, and increase his danger. The two last I repented giving he made me put them into his box, unread. "January 15.

Torlonia the banker has refused us any more money. The bill is returned unaccepted, and to-morrow I must pay my last crown for this cursed lodging-place: and what is more, if he dies, all the beds and furniture will be burnt, and the walls scraped, and they will come on me for a hundred pounds or more. ... You see my hopes of being kept by the Royal Academy will be cut off unless I send a picture in the spring. I have written to Sir T. Lawrence.

'February 12. At times I have hoped he would recover; but the doctor shook his head, and Keats would not hear that he was better; the thought of recovery is beyond everything dreadful to him.

[To Mrs. Brawne.] "February 14. His mind is growing to great quietness and peace. I find this change has its rise from the increasing weakness of his body; but it seems like a delightful sleep to me, I have been beating about in the tempest of his mind so long. To-night he has talked very much to me, but so easily

that he at last fell into a pleasant sleep. He seems to have comfortable dreams without nightmare. This will bring on some change: it cannot be worse-it may be better. Among the many things he has requested of me to-night, this is the principal-that on his grave shall be this, 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.'. . . Such a letter has come! I gave it to Keats, supposing it to be one of yours; but it proved sadly otherwise. The glance of that letter tore him to pieces. The effects were on him for many days. He did not read it-he could not; but requested me to place it in his coffin, together with a purse and letter (unopened) of his sister's: since which time he has requested me not to place that letter in his coffin, but only his sister's purse and letter, with some hair. Then he found many causes of his illness in the exciting and thwarting of his passions; but I persuaded him to feel otherwise on this delicate point. I have got an English nurse to come two hours every other day. . . . He has taken half a pint of fresh milk: the milk here is beautiful to all the senses-it is delicious. For three weeks he has lived on it, sometimes taking a pint and a half in a day.

...

...

"February 22. This morning, by the pale daylight, the change in him frightened me: he has sunk in the last three days to a most ghastly look. . He opens his eyes in great doubt and horror; but, when they fall upon me, they close gently, open quietly, and close again, till he sinks to sleep.

"February 27. He is gone.

He died with the most

perfect ease he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, about four, the approaches of death came on. 'Severn

e

—I—lift me up. I am dying-I shall die easy. Don't be frightened be firm, and thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet that I still thought he slept. I cannot say more now. I am broken down by four nights' watching, no sleep since, and my poor Keats gone. Three days since the body was opened: the lungs were completely gone. The doctors could not imagine how he had lived these two months. I followed his dear body to the grave on Monday [February 26th], with many English. . . . The letters I placed in the coffin with my own hand."

No words of mine shall be added here to tarnish upon the mirror of memory this image of a sacred death and a sacred friendship.

WE

CHAPTER IV.

E have now reached the close of a melancholy history—that of the extinction, in a space of less than twenty-six years, of a bright life foredoomed by inherited disease. We turn to another subject—the intellectual development and the writings of Keats, what they were, and how they were treated. Here again there are some sombre tints.

A minute anecdote, apparently quite authentic, shows that a certain propensity to the jingle of rhyme was innate in Keats: Haydon is our informant. "An old lady (Mrs. Grafty, of Craven Street, Finsbury) told his brother George-when, in reply to her question what John was doing, he told her he had determined to become a poet-that this was very odd; because when he could just speak, instead of answering questions put to him, he would always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and then laugh." This, however, is the only rhyming-anecdote that we hear of Keats's childhood or mere boyhood: there is nothing to show that at school he made the faintest attempt at verse-spinning. The earliest known experiment of his is the "Imitation of Spenser "-four Spenserian stanzas, beginning—

"Now Morning from her orient chamber came,"

and very poor stanzas they are.

This Imitation was

written while he was living at Edmonton, in his nineteenth year, and thus there was nothing singularly precocious in Keats, either in the age at which he began versifying, or in the skill with which he first addressed himself to the task. I might say more of other verses, juvenile in the amplest sense of the term, but such remarks would belong more properly to a later section of this volume. I will therefore only observe here that the earliest poems of his in which I can discern anything even distantly approaching to poetic merit or to his own characteristic style (and these distantly indeed) are the lines "To" "Hadst thou lived in days of old,"

and "Calidore, a Fragment,"

"Young Calidore is paddling o'er the lake."

The dates of these two compositions are not stated, but they were probably later than the opening of 1815, and if so Keats would have been nearly or quite twenty when he wrote them—and this is far remote from precocity. Let us say then, once for all, that, whatever may be the praise and homage due to Keats for ranking as one of the immortals when he died aged twenty-five, no sort of encomium can be awarded to him on the ground that, when he first began, he began early and well. All his rawest attempts, be it added to his credit, appear to have been kept to himself; for Cowden Clarke, who was certainly his chief literary confidant in those tentative days, says that until Keats produced to him his sonnet