who
was slain by his own brother at the founding of the city, so ancient and
mysterious it appears; but we have now, perhaps unfortunately, more
accurate information about it, and know that it is the tomb of one Caius
Cestius, a Roman gentleman of small note, who died about 30 B.C.

Yet though we cannot care much for the dead man who lies in lonely state
beneath it, and who is only known to the world through his sepulchre,
still this pyramid will be ever dear to the eyes of all English-speaking
people, because at evening its shadows fall on the tomb of one who walks
with Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Byron, and Shelley, and Elizabeth
Barrett Browning in the great procession of the sweet singers of England.

For at its foot there is a green sunny slope, known as the Old Protestant
Cemetery, and on this a common-looking grave, which bears the following
inscription:

This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who
on his deathbed, in the bitterness of his heart, desired these words
to be engraven on his tombstone: HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN
WATER. February 24, 1821.

And the name of the young English poet is John Keats.

Lord Houghton calls this cemetery 'one of the most beautiful spots on
which the eye and heart of man can rest,' and Shelley speaks of it as
making one 'in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so
sweet a place'; and indeed when I saw the violets and the daisies and the
poppies that overgrow the tomb, I remembered how the dead poet had once
told his friend that he thought the 'intensest pleasure he had received
in life was in watching the growth of flowers,' and how another time,
after lying a while quite still, he murmured in some strange prescience
of early death, 'I feel the flowers growing over me.'

But this time-worn stone and these wildflowers are but poor memorials {2}
of one so great as Keats; most of all, too, in this city of Rome, which
pays such honour to her dead; where popes, and emperors, and saints, and
cardinals lie hidden in 'porphyry wombs,' or couched in baths of jasper
and chalcedony and malachite, ablaze with precious stones and metals, and
tended with continual service. For very noble is the site, and worthy of
a noble monument; behind looms the grey pyramid, symbol of the world's
age, and filled with memories of the sphinx, and the lotus leaf, and the
glories of old Nile; in front is the Monte Testaccio, built, it