s brothers and sisters in
charge of guardians. Their first act seems to have been to take Keats from
school at Enfield, and to bind him as an apprentice to a surgeon at
Edmonton. For five years he served his apprenticeship, and for two years
more he was surgeon's helper in the hospitals; but though skillful enough
to win approval, he disliked his work, and his thoughts were on other
things. "The other day, during a lecture," he said to a friend, "there came
a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in
the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland." A copy of
Spenser's _Faery Queen_, which had been given him by Charles Cowden Clark,
was the prime cause of his abstraction. He abandoned his profession in
1817, and early in the same year published his first volume of _Poems_. It
was modest enough in spirit, as was also his second volume, _Endymion_
(1818); but that did not prevent brutal attacks upon the author and his
work by the self-constituted critics of _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the
_Quarterly_. It is often alleged that the poet's spirit and ambition were
broken by these attacks;[229] but Keats was a man of strong character, and
instead of quarreling with his reviewers, or being crushed by their
criticism, he went quietly to work with the idea of producing poetry that
should live forever. As Matthew Arnold says, Keats "had flint and iron in
him"; and in his next volume he accomplished his own purpose and silenced
unfriendly criticism.

For the three years during which Keats wrote his poetry he lived chiefly in
London and in Hampstead, but wandered at times over England and Scotland,
living for brief spaces in the Isle of Wight, in Devonshire, and in the
Lake district, seeking to recover his own health, and especially to restore
that of his brother. His illness began with a severe cold, but soon
developed into consumption; and added to this sorrow was another,--his love
for Fannie Brawne, to whom he was engaged, but whom he could not marry on
account of his poverty and growing illness. When we remember all this
personal grief and the harsh criticism of literary men, the last small
volume, _Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems_ (1820), is
most significant, as showing not only Keats's wonderful poetic gifts, but
also his beautiful and indomitable spirit. Shelley, struck by the beauty
and promise of "Hyperion," sent a generous invitation to the author to come
to P