ranates, with heads of cherubim over niches in the
center of the building. The elegance of the design and the perfect
finish of the structure were such as to procure its protection when a
branch railway was brought from the Ware and Cambridge line to
Enfield....

Here it was that John Keats all but commenced, and did complete, his
school education. He was born on the twenty-ninth of October, 1795,
and he was one of the little fellows who had not wholly emerged from
the child's costume upon being placed under my father's care. It will
be readily conceived that it is difficult to recall from the "dark
backward and abysm" of seventy-odd years the general acts of perhaps
the youngest individual in a corporation of between seventy and
eighty youngsters; and very little more of Keats's child-life can I
remember than that he had a brisk, winning face, and was a favorite
with all, particularly my mother....

Keats's father was the principal servant at the Swan and Hoop
stables--a man of so remarkably fine a common-sense, and native
respectability, that I perfectly remember the warm terms in which his
demeanor used to be canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit
his boys. John was the only one resembling him in person and feature,
with brown hair and dark hazel eyes. The father was killed by a fall
from his horse in returning from a visit to the school. This detail may
be deemed requisite when we see in the last memoir of the poet the
statement that "John Keats was born on the twenty-ninth of October,
1795, in the upper rank of the middle class." His two brothers--George,
older, and Thomas, younger than himself--were like the mother, who was
tall, of good figure, with large oval face and sensible deportment. The
last of the family was a sister--Fanny, I think, much younger than
all,--and I hope still living (in 1874)--of whom I remember, when once
walking in the garden with her brothers, my mother speaking of her with
much fondness for her pretty and simple manners....

In the early part of his school-life John gave no extraordinary
indications of intellectual character; but it was remembered of him
afterwards, that there was ever present a determined and steady spirit
in all his undertakings: I never knew it misdirected in his required
pursuit of study. He was a most orderly scholar. The future
ramifications of that noble genius were then closely shut in the seed,
which was greedily drinking in the moisture which ma