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!'" This was in February, 1820; and a year later, February, 1821, he was dead. 66 The history of that last year is all of misery. The disease grew quickly worse. He could do no work, except to revise the proofs of his last volume of poems, which was published in July, 1820; he spent his days "lying on a white bed, with white quilt and white sheets; the only color . . the hectic flush of his cheeks." In September, as a last desperate chance, he sailed for Italy; after a few weeks in Naples, drove the two hundred miles to Rome, and there settled down to die. I feel the flowers growing over me," he said, and he used to ask the doctor, "When will this posthumous life of mine come to an end?" It ended February 23, 1821. His friend Joseph Severn was with him all the while. They were almost the same age. It is strange to remember that Severn died also in Rome, fifty-eight years later! The house in which Keats died was recently bought by an association of English and American lovers of poetry, and is now kept up as a memorial of the poet, and of Shelley. The two, who died within eighteen months of each other, are buried in the English cemetery at Rome "a light of laughing flowers above their graves is spread." Compared with the amount of poetry that Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, or Browning wrote, Keats's total production is very slight. It may all be put into one small volume. But even one or two poems, as in Gray's case, are sometimes sufficient to ensure fame, and Keats wrote enough to make the wonderful nature of his powers clear. The longest poem, Endymion, though it contains many beautiful passages, he was right in thinking immature. The next longest, Hyperion, he never finished. Other extended efforts, Isabella and Lamia, are well known, but not quite of the first rank. His finest achievements were The Eve of St. Agnes, half a dozen splendid sonnets, the little ballad called La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and the famous group of odes—to Autumn, to Indolence, to Melancholy, to a Nightingale, and on a Grecian Urn. For vividness of color, beauty of figure, and witchery of melody, it would be hard if not impossible to find any lines in English poetry to equal his. "The silver snarling trumpets 'gan to chide," "And still she slept an azurelidded sleep," "Its little smoke in pallid moonshine died," "From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon," "Beaded bubbles winking at the brim," "Forever wilt thou love and she be fair"-there is about all these, whether elaborately worked like the first or simplified almost to monosyllables like the last, a marvelous fascination to the ear-a fascination that rises to its greatest height, perhaps, in two lines from the Ode to a Nightingale "Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." Critics have called Keats's poetry "sensuous," that is, concerned with things that delight the senses, like odors and flavors and sounds, rather than with what delights the mind and the spirit. Some of it is sensuous, frankly So. Keats was attracted by physical sensations. The story goes, for instance, that on one occasion he covered his tongue with cayenne pepper, to thrill with the fiery torment of the smart. His imagination played with rich colors and poignant perfumes and sweet sounds. But if such had been his only material, his work must have died. He goes far beyond physical sensations in such lines as these from the Grecian Urn:— "Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity! Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste or these again from the Nightingale:— "Quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.' His one attempt at the ballad form, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, is as striking a success in its simplicity as the Odes are in their richness. It is hardly a story, rather a picture of a knight whom love has enchanted to his ruin. It may be that while he was writing it Keats was thinking of his own wild passion and the beginning of his own sad end. At all events the poem equals anything of Coleridge on Coleridge's own ground-the supernatural. What heights would Keats have reached had his strength not failed him? No one can tell, of course. He might have thrown away his powers like Coleridge, or lost the gift of melody, like Wordsworth; but this it is hard to believe. The faults of his poetry are boyish faults, faults of judgment and taste, faults which it seems likely he would have altogether outgrown. The charm of it is in spite of these things. Shakespeare as a young poet had precisely the same faults. At his best, and free from these faults, Keats showed a splendor of picture-making imagination far more striking than Shakespeare or Milton possessed at twenty-five. Had he lived to be as old as they, he might perhaps have become the greatest poet in the English language. VI THE LESSER POETS Biographical Sketches SKETCHES have been already given of the four early nineteenth century poets who are commonly called the greatest of their time. But, as is always true, the great poets were not the only ones who wrote beautiful poetry; many others occasionally rose to splendid verse. A little of this verse, either for its own sake alone, or because it is well known, has been added here. A word or two about its writers will be in place. Sir Walter Scott (1772-1832) was the most famous of the lesser poets. In fact, in his own day, he was far more famous than any of the four who have already been discussed. His poetry, romantic, picturesque, and full of adventure, suited nearly everybody, though Scott said himself, half-seriously, that boys and soldiers were particularly fond of it. There is a story which illustrates his point. In 1808, when the English were fighting Napoleon in Spain, a company of soldiers was lying partly exposed under fire. To keep the men steady one of the officers read aloud the story of the battle from The Lady of the Lake, then a new work; and the soldiers lay still, only now and then interrupting the reader with cheers. Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1772. He studied law, but was chiefly interested in history and the Scottish legends. He began his real career as a poet when he was about thirty-five years old, and went on with it ten years. Then he left verse-making and turned to novel-writing, which he kept up constantly for the rest of his life. For his services to literature he was made a baronet in 1820. Out of both his poems and his novels he made a great deal of money; but he became involved in the bankruptcy of a firm of publishers, which left him $400,000 in debt. The debt he paid off finally, but the struggle wore him out and killed him. Scott was one of the most friendly, generous, loyal men who ever wrote English, and in his own time he was perhaps of all authors the best-loved. Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), Thomas Moore (1779– 1852) and Thomas Hood (1799-1845) were also men of reputation in their own day, though of nothing like the popularity of Scott. Campbell is remembered for his patriotic and martial verse-Ye Mariners of England is a famous national song. Moore was an Irishman, a true song-writer; many of his poems, such as Oft in the Stilly Night, The Last Rose of Summer, and The Harp that Once Through Tara's Halls are best known with their musical settings. His longest poem, very popular in its own day, is Lalla Rookh. Hood was chiefly a humorist—a man something like, in spirit, our own Oliver Wendell Holmes, never too comical to be unsympathetic. Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was the most brilliant essayist of his day. He is better known for his prose than for his poetry. Adopting the nom de plume of "Elia,” he wrote scores of papers, intimate and whimsical, which |