of
recovery, this passion would kill me." In the autumn of 1820, his
disease gaining apace, he went on a sailing vessel to Italy,
accompanied by a single friend, a young artist named Severn. The change
was of no avail, and he died at Rome a few weeks after, in his
twenty-sixth year.

Keats was, above all things, the _artist_, with that love of the
beautiful and that instinct for its reproduction which are the artist's
divinest gifts. He cared little about the politics and philosophy of his
day, and he did not make his poetry the vehicle of ideas. It was
sensuous poetry, the poetry of youth and gladness. But if he had lived,
and if, with wider knowledge of men and deeper experience of life, he
had attained to Wordsworth's spiritual insight and to Byron's power of
passion and understanding, he would have become a greater poet than
either. For he had a style--a "natural magic"--which only needed the
chastening touch of a finer culture to make it superior to any thing in
modern English poetry, and to force us back to Milton or Shakspere for a
comparison. His tombstone, not far from Shelley's, bears the inscription
of his own choosing: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But
it would be within the limits of truth to say that it is written in
large characters on most of our contemporary poetry. "Wordsworth," says
Lowell, "has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their
forms." And he has influenced these out of all proportion to the amount
which he left, or to his intellectual range, by virtue of the exquisite
quality of his _technique_.

* * * * *

1. Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England, 18th-19th
Centuries. London: Macmillan & Co., 1883.

2. Wordsworth's Poems. Chosen and edited by Matthew
Arnold. London, 1879.

3. Poetry of Byron. Chosen and arranged by Matthew
Arnold. London, 1881.

4. Shelley. Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound,
The Cenci, Lyrical Pieces.

5. Landor. Pericles and Aspasia.

6. Coleridge. Table-Talk, Notes on Shakspere, The Ancient
Mariner, Christabel, Love, Ode to France, Ode to the Departing
Year, Kubla Khan, Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni,
Youth and Age, Frost at Midnight.

7. De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium Eater,
Flight of a Tartar Tribe, Biographical Sketches.

8. Scott. Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, Bride of Lammermoor,
Rob Roy, Antiquary, Marmion, Lady of the Lake.

9. Keats. Hyperion, Ev