"O CHATTERTON! HOW VERY SAD THY FATE". "BYRON! HOW SWEETLY SAD THY MELODY". "O SOLITUDE! IF I MUST WITH THee dwell "OH! HOW I LOVE, ON A FAIR SUMMER'S EVE". TO A YOUNG LADY WHO SENT ME A LAUREL CROWN 67 HOW MANY BARDS GILD THE LAPSES OF TIME ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER 78 ONSIDERING the place John Keats occupies in English literature, and the sympathetic pains Lord Houghton has taken to make plain the outward circumstances of the poet's short life, it is somewhat strange that at this time the general public should know so little about him that the majority of even intelligent men, at least in America, should accept, in ignorance of the real facts, Byron's ribald stanza in "Don Juan" as descriptive of Keats's fate. I have just read over again the articles in "Blackwood" and the "Quarterly" pretending to review "Endymion," and it seems inexplicable to me that any importance should ever have been attached to either. They were calculated to annoy a serious and sensitive person, and Keats was both sensitive and serious; but the idea that they killed him or hastened his death in the least seems to me absurd. I have before me now James Russell Lowell's "Life of Keats." This has been widely read, and read, too, by men who look upon VOL. II, B |