. Jane, however, resolved to be rowed to
Leghorn, since no boat could sail, and busied herself in preparation.
I wished her to wait for letters, since Friday was letter-day. She
would not, but the sea detained her; the swell rose so that no boat
would endure out. At twelve at noon our letters came; there was one
from Hunt to Shelley; it said, 'Pray write to tell us how you got
home, for they say that you had bad weather after you sailed on Monday
and we are anxious.' The paper fell from me. I trembled all over. Jane
read it. 'Then it is all over,' she said. 'No, my dear Jane,' I cried,
'it is not all over, but this suspense is dreadful. Come with me--we
will go to Leghorn, we will post, to be swift and learn our fate.'

"We crossed to Lerici ... we posted to Pisa. It must have been fearful
to see us--two poor, wild, aghast creatures, driving (like Matilda)
towards the sea to learn if we were to be forever doomed to misery. I
knew that Hunt was at Pisa, at Lord Byron's house, but I thought that
Lord Byron was at Leghorn. I settled that we should drive to Casa
Lanfranchi, that I should get out and ask the fearful question of
Hunt, 'Do you know anything of Shelley?' On entering Pisa, the idea of
seeing Hunt for the first time for four years under such circumstances
and asking him such a question was so terrific to me that it was with
difficulty that I prevented myself from going into convulsions. My
struggles were dreadful. They knocked at the door and some one called
out, 'Chi e?' It was the Guiccioli's maid. Lord Byron was in Pisa.
Hunt was in bed, so I was to see Lord Byron instead of him. This was a
great relief to me. I staggered upstairs; the Guicciola came to meet
me smiling, while I could hardly say, 'Where is he--Sapete alcuna cosa
di Shelley?' They knew nothing; he had left Pisa on Sunday; on Monday
he had sailed; there had been bad weather Monday afternoon; more they
knew not."

XVII

THE SCHOOL-DAYS OF JOHN KEATS

In the village of Enfield, in Middlesex, ten miles on the North Road
from London, my father, John Clarke, says Charles Cowden Clarke in
_The Gentleman's Magazine_, kept a school. The house had been built by
a West India merchant in the latter end of the seventeenth or
beginning of the eighteenth century. It was of the better character of
the domestic architecture of that period, the whole front being of the
purest red brick, wrought by means of molds into rich designs of
flowers and pomeg