Domestic troubles were meanwhile thickening about the poet. His affection for his family was intense, as indeed were all his feelings; and from this he was destined to receive more of sorrow than of joy. The guardian of his sister Fanny, regarding the poet with the outraged propriety of the British Philistine who has seen a respectable profession thrust aside to give place for so doubtful an occupation as verse-making, discouraged if he did not actually endeavor to prevent all intimacy between his ward and her brother. George, the second of the Keats children, married and emigrated to America in the spring of 1818. The third brother, Tom, whom John loved very tenderly, was dying of consumption; and the poet was undoubtedly weakened by the devotion with which he nursed the invalid. The death. of Tom in the autumn of 1818 was a blow so terrible that its effects were not to be shaken off, coming as it did at a time when disease, loneliness and discouragement had lessened Keats's vitality and weakened his power of resistance.

It might have seemed, indeed, that there was consolation in the fact that during this same autumn Keats became engaged to Miss Fanny Brawne, for whom he conceived a } passion which was characteristic of his ardent nature; but in the event there proved to be for him in this love more of 1 torment than of joy. Through the melancholy weeks of his rapidly increasing illness in the year following, he wrote to her a series of letters marked with mad love, despairing desire, ever increasing misery and morbid frenzy born of the passionate consciousness that the bony fingers of death were already clutching his wrist to lead him away from all his ambitions and from his love. The publication of these letters in our own day by those who profess to admire the genius and to cherish the memory of Keats, was an outrage incomparably greater than any attack made upon the poet in his lifetime by hostile reviewers. They prove, however,

how much more of anguish than of bliss came to him through this passion.

In this year, 1818, besides the beginning of Hyperion, Isabella and the Eve of St. Agnes were written. Lamia and the great odes belong to the year following. Keats also produced with his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, a blankverse tragedy, called Otho the Great, Brown furnishing the story and Keats the verse. There was at one time a prospect that this might be acted, and Keats, hoping to find in dramatic literature a means of livelihood, began alone a tragedy on the life of King Stephen, which he soon abandoned unfinished.

In the autumn of 1819 Keats took lodgings in London, declaring his intention of writing for the periodicals for support. His means were nearly exhausted, his health was steadily failing, and he was worn out alike by the sense of the desperate struggle in which his life was involved and by a burning desire to regain strength and means which would allow him to marry. He attempted a recast of Hyperion, but with a result so little satisfactory that for a long time. the later version was believed to be an earlier attempt than the original. He also wrote part of what was to be a comic fairy poem, somewhat in the style of Ariosto. It was called Cap and Bells; or, Jealousies, and was to be published over the name Lucy Vaughn Lloyd. There are a few scattered touches of the real Keats in it, but on the whole perhaps nothing more need be said of it than that it is better forgotten as the unworthy product of a brain sick and distraught.

In February Keats received a chill by riding on the outside of a stage-coach, and this was followed by a hemorrhage. The incident, as told by his friend Brown, is movingly pathetic.

"I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed,

and I heard him say, 'That is blood from my mouth.' I went toward him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet. Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.' After regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said, 'I know the color of that blood - it is arterial blood-I cannot be deceived in that color—that drop of blood is my death-warrant I must die.""

He continued in failing health through the spring, sometimes better and sometimes worse, unable to do any work beyond the revising of his last volume of poems for the press. This appeared in the summer of 1820. It was called, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems. The fragment of Hyperion was included at the request of the publishers. The reviews of this volume were respectful, and in many cases even enthusiastic. Jeffrey praised it in the Edinburgh Review, and poor Keats, in poverty, despairing and dying, began to be recognized as a man of genius. Even Byron, who had seen nothing in Keats's early work, pronounced Hyperion worthy of Æschylus.

The poet was by this time, however, too ill to care greatly even for the success for which he had so passionately longed. The fire of his imaginative temperament, shown alike in his poetry and in his love, combined with disease to consume his strength. The physicians warned him that his only chance of life lay in wintering in the south; and in September he took passage for Naples, accompanied by the young painter, Joseph Severn, whose devoted friendship can never be forgotten or thought of without admiration so long as the name of Keats is remembered.

The invalid reached Rome in November, and in misery, in poverty, in anguish, he lingered on until February 23, 1821. The last letter of his betrothed, which he had lacked the

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strength and self-control to read, was placed unopened in his coffin, and he was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, near the pyramid of Caius Cestius. Upon his tombstone, at his request, were placed the words which he had himself chosen as his epitaph : Here lies one whose name was writ in water." "The cemetery," wrote Shelley in the preface to Adonais, the immortal elegy in which he sang the death and glory of the too early dead poet, "is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." In the following year the ashes of Shelley himself were interred a few paces distant.

ee

"The publication of three small volumes of verse," Lord Houghton sums up the life of Keats, some earnest friendships, one profound passion, and a premature death. . . [are] the only incidents of his career."

The reader of poetry is unwise to concern himself too much with the personality of the poet; and yet human interest almost inevitably demands some knowledge of the character of any writer whose work has moved us. It is not unfair to judge something of a poet's intentions and the meaning of his work by the effect which as a man he has had upon those who came most nearly in contact with him; and tried by this test John Keats will rank high. There is no lack of proof of the warmth of affection with which he was regarded by his friends, who retained, in many cases through long lives, the most tender memories of the dead friend whom they had known in the poet. "Whose genius I did not . . . more fully admire than I entirely loved the man," wrote Archdeacon Bailey a quarter of a century after

Keats's death; and again: "He had a soul of noble integrity, and his common sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed, his character was, in the best sense, manly." "He was the sincerest.friend," declared Reynolds, himself a poet not without talent, "the most lovable associate, the deepest listener to the griefs and distresses of all around him that ever lived in this tide of times.'" And even the self-absorbed painter Haydon pronounced Keats the most unselfish of human creatures."

Of his faithful devotion to his art, of his indefatigable labor to improve in the vocation he had chosen, there is abundant testimony. "There is but one way for me," he wrote to a friend. "The road lies through study, application and thought." "I feel assured," he says again, "I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's labors should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever rest upon them." Nor was he to be deterred by the difficulties which stood in his way. "I think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a man,” he says nobly; and he adds, with an unconscious revelation of the keenness with which his sensitive nature felt the stings of adverse fortune and unjust criticism: "They make our prime objects a refuge as well as a passion." When censure or sorrow hurt him, poetry was at once his passion and his refuge. The publication of the revisions which he made in his work from its first draft to the completed form show how careful and painstaking he was, despite the fact that he wrote with so much ardor, and with so much poetical exaltation. Like all men of imaginative temperament, he varied in his mood, being now confident of his high calling and again in bitter doubt. "I have asked myself so often," he says in a letter, "why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is, how great things are to be gained by it, what a thing it is to be in the mouth