isa and live with him; but Keats refused, having little sympathy with
Shelley's revolt against society. The invitation had this effect, however,
that it turned Keats's thoughts to Italy, whither he soon went in the
effort to save his life. He settled in Rome with his friend Severn, the
artist, but died soon after his arrival, in February, 1821. His grave, in
the Protestant cemetery at Rome, is still an object of pilgrimage to
thousands of tourists; for among all our poets there is hardly another
whose heroic life and tragic death have so appealed to the hearts of poets
and young enthusiasts.

THE WORK OF KEATS. "None but the master shall praise us; and none but the
master shall blame" might well be written on the fly leaf of every volume
of Keats's poetry; for never was there a poet more devoted to his ideal,
entirely independent of success or failure. In strong contrast with his
contemporary, Byron, who professed to despise the art that made him famous,
Keats lived for poetry alone, and, as Lowell pointed out, a virtue went out
of him into everything he wrote. In all his work we have the impression of
this intense loyalty to his art; we have the impression also of a profound
dissatisfaction that the deed falls so far short of the splendid dream.
Thus after reading Chapman's translation of Homer he writes:

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

In this striking sonnet we have a suggestion of Keats's high ideal, and of
his sadness because of his own ignorance, when he published his first
little volume of poems in 1817. He knew no Greek; yet Greek literature
absorbed and fascinated him, as he saw its broken and imperfect reflection
in an English translation. Like Shakespeare, who also was but poorly
educated in the schools, he had a marvelous faculty of discerning the real
spirit of the classics,--a faculty denied to many great scholar