of executive power braced up to do constantly
better and yet better; but then, about a year and a half after the
reviews, supervened his fatal illness (which cannot be reasonably
supposed to have had its root in any critiques), and all the heartache
of his unsatisfied love. This last formed the real agony of his waning
life: it must have been reinforced to some extent by resentment against
a mode of reviewing which would contribute to the thwarting of his
poetic ambition, and make him go down into the grave with a "name writ
in water;" but the reviews themselves counted for very little in the
last wrestlings of his spirit with death and nothingness. By general
constitution of mind few men were less adapted than Keats for being
"snuffed out by an article," or more certain to snuff one out and leave
all its ill-savour to its scribe.

CHAPTER VI.

The first important poem to which Keats sets his hand after finishing
"Endymion" was "Isabella, or The Pot of Basil." This was completed by
April 27, 1818, the same month in which "Endymion" was published.
Hamilton Reynolds had suggested the project of producing a volume of
tales in verse, founded upon stories in Boccaccio's "Decameron"; some of
the tales would have been executed by Reynolds himself, who did in fact
produce on this plan the two poems named collectively "The Garden of
Florence." As it turned out, however, Keats's tale appeared in a volume
of his own, 1820, and Reynolds's two came out independently in the
succeeding year.

"The Eve of St. Agnes" was written in the winter beginning the year
1819. Then came "Hyperion," of which two versions remain, both
fragmentary. The first version (begun perhaps as early as October or
September 1818), the only one which Keats himself published, is in all
respects by far the better. He was much under the spell of Milton while
he wrote it; and finally he gave it up in September 1819, declaring that
"there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." He went so far as to
say in a letter written in the same month that "the 'Paradise Lost,'
though so fine in itself, is a corruption of our language--a northern
dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and
intonations." "Hyperion" was included in Keats's third volume at the
request of the publishers, contrary to the author's own preference. One
may readily infer that it was to "Hyperion" that he referred when, in
the preface to "Endymion," he spoke of returning