popular mythologies;
and later through the marbles and casts in the British Museum. His
friend, the artist Haydon, lent him a copy of Chapman's Homer, and the
impression that it made upon him he recorded in his sonnet, _On First
Looking into Chapman's Homer_. Other poems of the same inspiration are
his three sonnets, _To Homer_, _On Seeing the Elgin Marbles_, _On a
Picture of Leander_, _Lamia_, and the beautiful _Ode on a Grecian Urn_.
But Keats's art was retrospective and eclectic, the blossom of a double
root; and "golden-tongued Romance with serene lute" had her part in him,
as well as the classics. In his seventeenth year he {263} had read the
_Faery Queene_, and from Spenser he went on to a study of Chaucer,
Shakspere, and Milton. Then he took up Italian and read _Ariosto_. The
influence of these studies is seen in his poem, _Isabella, or the Pot of
Basil_, taken from a story of Boccaccio; in his wild ballad, _La Belle
Dame sans Merci_; and in his love tale, the _Eve of Saint Agnes_, with
its wealth of medieval adornment. In the _Ode to Autumn_, and _Ode to a
Nightingale_, the Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the warmer
hues of romance.

There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats's life. The
seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent
genius, but knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must die

"Before high-piled books, in charactry
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain."

His disease was aggravated, possibly, by the stupid brutality with which
the reviewers had treated _Endymion_; and certainly by the hopeless love
which devoured him. "The very thing which I want to live most for," he
wrote, "will be a great occasion of my death. If I had any chance of
recovery, this passion would kill me." In the autumn of 1820, his
disease gaining apace, he went on a sailing vessel to Italy, accompanied
by a single friend, a young artist named Severn. The change was of no
avail, and he died at Rome a few weeks after, in his twenty-sixth year.

{264}

Keats was, above all things, the _artist_, with that love of the
beautiful and that instinct for its reproduction which are the artist's
divinest gifts. He cared little about the politics and philosophy of his
day, and he did not make his poetry the vehicle of ideas. It was
sensuous poetry, the poetry of youth and gladness. But if he had lived,
and if, with wider knowledge of men and deeper