white bed, with white quilt and white sheets; the only colour visible . . . the hectic flush on his cheeks." The doctors now warned him that another winter in England would certainly prove fatal. With little hope of the result-feeling indeed very much as a soldier feels when he "marches up to a battery "-he resolved to try what Italy would do for him. Accompanied by a noble and generous friend, the young artist, Joseph Severn, he sailed from Gravesend on September 18, leaving behind him many sad hearts, whose feelings were very touchingly expressed in the tender little farewell which Leigh Hunt printed in "The Indicator": "Thou shalt return with thy friend the nightingale, and make all thy other friends happy with thy voice, as they are sorrowful to miss it. The little cage thou didst sometime share with us looks as deficient without thee as thy present one may do without us; but farewell for a while-thy heart is in our fields, and thou wilt soon be back to rejoin it." Alas!in Virgil's beautiful phrase of lament for young Ripheus-"Dis aliter visum"-the gods saw otherwise.

It was on board ship, and while still in the English Channel, that Keats penned the last lines of poetry that he was ever to write-a sonnet inspired by his hopeless love :

Bright star

HIS LAST SONNET

would I were steadfast as thou artNot in lone splendour hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

hermit

Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-
No-yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever-or else swoon to death.

The two travellers arrived in Naples late in October; they were detained there ten days in quarantine; and there Keats wrote a letter to Brown in which, speaking of Miss Brawne, he reveals in phrases which wring one's heart when one reads them, the terrible extremity of his mental sufferings: "I can bear to die—I cannot bear to leave her.... Oh, God! God! God! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling-cap scalds my head. My imagination is horridly vivid about her-I see her-I hear her.

Oh, Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me that the human heart is capable of so much misery." With astonishing courage and self-control, he had contrived to conceal from his travelling companion his anguish and despair, and noting the beneficial effect which the voyage had had upon him, and his apparent cheerfulness, Severn was encouraged to believe

2

that he would yet get well. But this belief was destroyed when in due course they reached Rome. The hæmorrhages returned, and constant fever reduced him to a condition of pitiable weakness. Little by little, however, his mental agitation subsided; he grew reconciled to death, and came even to long for its peace. "I feel," he once said, "the flowers growing over me ; he had already told Severn that perhaps his intensest pleasure in life had been in watching the growth of flowers, and that poetic fancy seemed to give him a deep satisfaction. For two months and a half he thus lingered on. On February 23, 1821, he breathed his last in the arms of his loving friend. Three days later his body was laid in its final resting-place close by the Aurelian wall in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome.

T

VII

HE brief life-story which has here been retold must, I think, leave us all with a sad sense of incompleteness. Dying before he was twenty-six, John Keats enriched the world with a number of poems which have given him an assured place among the great masters of our English verse. But if, as we turn over the pages of his collected works, we are stirred to wonder at his actual achievement, the wonder presently gives way to the thought of the vast promise which was destined to remain everlastingly unfulfilled. For death cut him down when, as his later poems

and letters alike testify, he was still standing on the threshold of greater things. During the last few years of his poetic activity, his genius had been growing rapidly; and while, of course, it is idle to speculate on what might have been, the signs of yet further growth cannot be overlooked or mistaken. It is one of the commonplaces of criticism that, rich as Keats's poetry is in beauty, colour, imagination, and verbal magic, it is deficient in thought--in that quality "which is one of the constituent elements of the greatest things in literature. But there is evidence to show that Keats had himself come to recognise this deficiency, and that the rapid development of his poetic powers was accompanied by a parallel development on the intellectual side. The following remarkable passage from one of his letters to Reynolds should be read with great

of high seriousness

care:

"An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people; it takes away the heat and fever, and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery, a thing which I begin to understand a little. The difference of high sensations with and without knowledge, appears to me this in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again, without wings, and with all the horror of a bare-shouldered creature; in the former case our shoulders are fledged, and we go through the same air and space without fear. . . . I compare human life to a large

mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe (i.e., only two of which I can describe), the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me. The first we step into we call the Infant, or Thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think. We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it, but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle within us. We no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere. We see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight. However, among the effects this breathing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of man, of convincing one's nerves that the world is full of misery and heart-break, pain, sickness, and oppression, whereby this Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set open -but all dark-all leading to dark passages. We see not the balance of good and evil; we are in a mist; we are now in that state, we feel the burden of the mystery. To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive, when he wrote Tintern Abbey,' and it seems to me that his genius is explorative of those dark passages. Now if we live and go on thinking,