n of much of Vergil's
_AEneid_. It would seem as if he had also been attracted to
Shakespeare; for Keats is credited with expressing to a young playmate
the opinion that no one, if alone in the house, would dare read
_Macbeth_ at two in the morning.

When Keats was left an orphan in his fifteenth year, he was taken from
school and apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton, near London.

When seventeen, he walked some distance to borrow a copy of Spenser's
_Faerie Queene_. A friend says: "Keats ramped through the scenes of
the romance like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." His study
of Grecian mythology and Elizabethan poetry exerted a stronger
influence over him than his medical instructor. One day when Keats
should have been listening to a surgical lecture, "there came," he
says, "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 fairy
land."

He made a moderately good surgeon; but finding that his heart was
constantly with "Oberon and the fairy land" of poesy, he gave up his
profession in 1817 and began to study hard, preparatory to a literary
career.

His short life was a brave struggle against disease, poverty, and
unfriendly criticism; but he accomplished more than any other English
author in the first twenty-five years of life. Success under such
conditions would have been impossible unless he had had "flint and
iron in him." He wrote:--

"I must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a man. They make
his Prime Objects a Refuge as well as a Passion."

Late in 1818, after he had published his first volume of verse, he met
Fanny Brawne, a girl of eighteen, and soon fell desperately in love
with her. The next six months were the happiest and the most
productive period of his life. His health was then such that he could
take long walks with her. In the first spring after he had met her, he
wrote in less than three hours his wonderful _Ode to a Nightingale_,
while he was sitting in the garden of his home at Wentworth Place,
Hampstead, near London, listening to the song of the bird. Most of his
famous poems were written in the year after meeting her.

In February, 1820, his health began to decline so rapidly that he knew
that his days were numbered. His mother and one of his brothers had
died of consumption, and he had been for some time threatened with the
disease. He offered to release Miss Brawne from her engagement, but
s