friend, and seems to lack the peculiar geniz and inspiration of Keats altogether.

S

A Highland tour, a visit to Shanklin, sojourn in Winchester, a more prolonged re sidence in Hampstead, and the death of his brother Tom, whom he nursed to the end, seen to make up the few circumstances of the perio of his literary life; and then the shadows begin to fall rapidly, and the sunlight is broken off abruptly and for ever. Money troubles pressed upon the young poet, and in the autumn of 1810 his health gave way altogether, and he broke a blood-vessel. That is my death-warrant," he said, when he saw the blood. 'I must die.'

For a while he partially rallied, and cast about for something to do. The choice seemed to lie between going to South America or being surgeon on an Indiaman. He inclined to the latter scheme, but consumptive signs came on rapidly, and he was ordered abroad. The artist Severn went with him, and the devotion and self-abnegation of this friend, and the kindness of Sir James Clark, then a doctor in Rome, are the only gleams of light which break through the gloom of the end. From Naples

C

Keats wrote to one of his friends: 'It surprises 'me that the human heart is capable of con'taining and bearing so much misery.' With what mournfully prophetic power must the words of the sad princess' in his own 'Endy'mion' have come back to him :

Yet I would have, great gods, but one short hour
Of native air. Let me but die at home.

From Rome, at the end of November 1820, he wrote his last letter, which ends thus: If I

recover I will do all in my power to correct 'the mistakes I made during sickness, and if I 'should not, all my faults will be forgiven. Write 'to George as soon as you receive this, and tell ' him how I am as far as you can guess, and ' also a note to my sister, who walks about my 'imagination like a ghost, she is so like Tom. 'I can scarcely bid you good-bye even in a ' letter. I always made an awkward bow. God 'bless you.-JOHN KEATS.'

The story of those days of dying is chiefly a story of pain: 'the sense of darkness coming over 'him,'' the eternal vision of her whom he loved eternally vanishing;' and his friend Severn praying by his side 'that some angel of good

'ness may yet lead him through this dark 'wilderness.' His thoughts grew calmer as death. came near. He felt the daisies growing over 'him,' he said. He begged that a letter and purse of his sister's, and a letter of his beloved's might be put into his coffin, and that his epitaph might be,' Here lies one whose name was writ

in water.' When death actually took him, his last words were, 'Thank God it has come.' He is buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, where the flowers grow over him all the year round.

Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doth not sleep!

He hath awakened from the dream of life.

'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay

Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight
Can touch him not, and torture not again.
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure; and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain ;
Nor when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

II.

THE sadness of this short life-story seems to stand out in sharp contrast to the joyous character of much of the poetry of Keats, for, until blighted by disease, joyousness was a distinct feature of his many - sided nature, a joyousness which keenly appreciated all natural delights and all pleasant sensations; which brought the undertone of music into 'Endymion,' the triumph into Hyperion,' the completed happiness into the 'Eve of St. Agnes,' the fairy fun into the 'Cap and Bells,' and the Greek feeling into all 'his handling of nature.'

Mr. Matthew Arnold particularises four ways of handling nature, two of which ways he attributes to Keats, viz.,' the 'Greek lightness and 'brightness,' and 'the charm and magic.' Keats in these respects has more sympathy with

Lectures on Celtic Literature. Lect. vi.

Shakespeare than with any of our other poets, possessing the same power of bringing to us in a few words all that sight, smell, or touch could carry away from anything beautiful, and weaving it into the very tissue of the memory, to abide with us as a possession. He draws no lessons from it, he points no morals; he simply leads us with a magical expression into the close sympathy which he has himself with nature, and makes it live for us as it does for him. He is penetrated by it in some measure as the Greeks were, and gives us its essence in his own nature. With two or three words of charm, he creates an atmosphere around the creatures of his imagination and makes them live, never lowering nature to their moods or his own, but harmonising all moods with nature. It is thus that he has left us such a wealth of complete word-pictures. We seem to be with him on the

Swelling downs, where sweet air stirs

Blue harebells lightly, and where prickly furze
Buds lavish gold.

We stand upon the little hill and see the pure white clouds, 'like flocks new-shorn.'