e is to hold fast to one's faith in what is pure
and beautiful, and to give thanks that such spirits as the spirit of
Keats are allowed to pass in flame across the dark heaven, calling from
horizon to horizon among the interstellar spaces; and to be sure that
the glow, the ardour, the aspirations that they impart to the soul are
real and true--an essential part of the mind of God, however small a
part they may be of that Eternal and all-embracing Will.

L

I saw this morning in the paper, half with amusement and half with
shame, a letter signed by a long list of the sort of people whom a
schoolboy would designate as "buffers," inviting the public to come
forward and subscribe for the purchase of the house where Keats died at
Rome, in order to make it a sort of Museum, sacred to him and Shelley.
I was amused, because of the strange ineptitude and clumsiness of the
proposal. In the first place, to make a shrine of pilgrimage for two of
our great English poets in _Rome_, of all places--that is fantastic
enough; but to select the house which Keats entered a dying man, and
where he spent about four months in horrible torture of both mind and
body, from which he wrote to his friend Brown, "I have an habitual
feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a
posthumous existence,"--could anything be more inappropriate? It is not
too much, in fact, to say that the house selected to enshrine his
memory is the house where he was less himself than at any other period
of his short life. If the house in Wentworth Place, Hampstead, which I
believe has been lately identified with absolute certainty, could have
been purchased,--the house where, on the verge of disaster and doom,
Keats spent a brief ecstatic interval of life,--there would have been
some meaning in that; but one might almost as well purchase the inn at
Dumfries where Keats once spent a few nights as the house at Rome; in
fact, if the Dumfries inn had been purchased, it might have been made a
Keats-Burns museum, if the idea was to kill two birds with one
stone--for to associate Shelley with Keats in the house at Rome is
another piece of well-meaning stupidity. Their acquaintance was really
of the slightest, though Shelley was extraordinarily kind and generous
to Keats, offering to receive him into his own house as an invalid, and
of course regarding him with the deepest admiration, as the _Adonais_
testifies. But Keats never took very much to Shelley