orf Astor for those from the Pall Mall
Gazette.

ROBERT ROSS

THE TOMB OF KEATS

(Irish Monthly, July 1877.)

As one enters Rome from the Via Ostiensis by the Porta San Paolo, the
first object that meets the eye is a marble pyramid which stands close at
hand on the left.

There are many Egyptian obelisks in Rome--tall, snakelike spires of red
sandstone, mottled with strange writings, which remind us of the pillars
of flame which led the children of Israel through the desert away from
the land of the Pharaohs; but more wonderful than these to look upon is
this gaunt, wedge-shaped pyramid standing here in this Italian city,
unshattered amid the ruins and wrecks of time, looking older than the
Eternal City itself, like terrible impassiveness turned to stone. And so
in the Middle Ages men supposed this to be the sepulchre of Remus, 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