f the coast of Dorsetshire, that Keats
wrote his last beautiful sonnet on a blank leaf of his folio copy of
Shakespeare, facing _A Lover's Complaint_:--

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

The friends reached Rome, and there Keats, after a brief rally, rapidly
became worse. Severn nursed him with desperate devotion, and of Keats's
sweet considerateness and patience he could never say enough. Indeed
such was the force and lovableness of Keats's personality that though
Severn lived fifty-eight years longer it was for the rest of his life a
chief occupation to write and draw his memories of his friend.

On February 23rd, 1821, came the end for which Keats had begun to long.
He died peacefully in Severn's arms. On the 26th he was buried in the
beautiful little Protestant cemetery of which Shelley said that it 'made
one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a
place'.

Great indignation was felt at the time by those who attributed his
death, in part at least, to the cruel treatment which he had received
from the critics. Shelley, in _Adonais_, withered them with his scorn,
and Byron, in _Don Juan_, had his gibe both at the poet and at his
enemies. But we know now how mistaken they were. Keats, in a normal
state of mind and body, was never unduly depressed by harsh or unfair
criticism. 'Praise or blame,' he wrote, 'has but a momentary effect on
the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic
on his own works,' and this attitude he consistently maintained
throughout his poetic career. No doubt the sense that his genius was
unappreciated added something to the torment of mind which he suffered
in Rome, and on his death-bed he asked that on his tombstone should be
inscribed the words 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water'. But it
was apparent