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

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.

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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."

III

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."

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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

of fame, that at last the idea has grown so monstrously beyond my seeming power of attainment that the other day I nearly consented with myself to drop into a Phaëton.” But his genius was strong within him, and would not let him abandon the career to which he was born; and there came moments, moreover, in which he had assurance that his power was genuine and his work enduring; and in one of these he said with simple and modest assurance: "I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.”

IV

Among the English poets he is, and of his genius and of his rank it is not easy to write briefly. Rightly viewed, every man of genius belongs to the succession in the priesthood of beauty; and it is not possible to study one without some consideration of all who, preceding him, prepared the way for him, and who, coming after, entered into the fruits of his endeavors. Short as was the life of John Keats, and small as was the actual bulk of his production, there is no one of his contemporaries who holds more distinctly or securely his place as the legitimate successor of the greatest among the English poets before him and as the necessary precursor of those who have followed.

When one is called upon to sum up the characteristics of the work of Keats, it is inevitable that first should come to mind his thrilling sensitiveness to sensuous beauty. His poetic philosophy is summed up in the oft-quoted lines :

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Interpreted in the light of almost all of Keats's earlier expressions, beauty is here to be taken as meaning that aspect of the beautiful which is apparent to the sense of

man, but to this beauty as perceived and assimilated by the imagination. No personal trait of the poet was more strikingly marked than his exquisite susceptibility to appeals to eye and ear; yet to these appeals it was his imagination which responded. That had he lived he would have developed a high appreciation of that beauty which is purely intellectual and spiritual seems evident from the great advance which he made in the three immortal years which practically comprised his art life; but taking his poetry as it stands, it is largely the wonderful music of an imagination vibrating in quick and delicate response to the delights of sensation. The joy of seeing, of hearing, of feeling, — the intoxication of emotions awakened by pleasurable appeals to senses responsive as the strings of a wind-harp, the motive of the greater part of Keats's poetry. was with him a delight of the sense. It seems to me rather idle to go about in attempts to disguise or evade this fact. It was part of his nature, and it was undoubtedly one of those youthful limitations which he would have outgrown had time been given him. To the exuberant spirit of his highly organized youth that beauty which thrilled him through his delicately excitable senses was the one thing most vital, the one thing most true.

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In this connection it is worth while to consider a moment the familiar comment that Keats was essentially a Greek. It is not difficult to see how the phrase came into use, but it is in reality not only empty but misleading. The abundant use of Hellenic myths which distinguished his poetry furnished an easy epithet to those who must ticket the poets, and who are the more eager to tag with an epithet the singer because they are unable to comprehend the song; while those characteristics which were common alike to the Greeks and to the greatest Elizabethans were sufficiently marked in our poet to excuse the adoption of the convenient