"Hyperion," no less than the enthusiastic odes and sonnets in praise of
Hellenic works of art, opened the eyes of many of the contemporaries of
Keats to the enduring beauties of Greece. It was in his exquisite "Ode to
a Grecian Urn," that Keats expressed his poetical master passion for
beauty:

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

[Illustration: LORD BYRON
Painted by Maurin]

[Sidenote: "Adonais"]

Shortly after Keats's death appeared one of the most beautiful of Shelley's
longer poems--"Adonais," written as an elegy on the death of Keats:

I weep for Adonais--he is dead.
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow! Say. "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity."

[Sidenote: Wilhelm Meister]

[Sidenote: Rise of romantic literature]

[Sidenote: Victor Hugo]

Other literary events of the year were the publication of Goethe's "Wilhelm
Meister's Wander Jahre," and of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin's first long
poem, "Ruslan and Ludmilla." In this epic, written during Pushkin's early
banishment to Bessarabia, an old Russian theme of the heroic times of Kiev
was treated much after the manner of Byron's romantic examples. In France
the romantic period in literature was inaugurated by young Victor Hugo,
who, but the year before, had been crowned as "Maitre des jeux floraux" for
a prize poem on Henri IV. Now Chateaubriand, in his journal "Le
Conservateur," welcomed him as "Un enfant sublime." By his own romantic
followers Hugo was hailed as chief of their poetic "Bataillon Sacre."
During the same year the poet, then barely nineteen, married Mademoiselle
Foucher, a girl of fifteen.

[Sidenote: Death of Napoleon]

The most important event of the year for Frenchmen was the death of
Napoleon Bonaparte at Longwood, in St. Helena. He died on May 5, after
taking the holy sacrament. He left a last will with several codicils. In it
Napoleon made the following declarations:

[Sidenote: Napoleon's will]

"I die in the Apostolical and Roman religion, in the bosom of which I was
born more than fifty years ago. It is my wish that my ashes may repose on
the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French p