he would not listen to the suggestion. She and her mother tried to
nurse him back to health. Few events in the history of English authors
are tinged with a deeper pathos than his engagement to Miss Brawne.
Some of the letters that he wrote to her or about her are almost
tragic. After he had taken his last leave of her he wrote, "I can bear
to die--I cannot bear to leave her."

[Illustration: WENTWORTH PLACE, KEATS'S HOME IN HAMPSTEAD.]

Acting on insistent medical advice, Keats sailed for Italy in
September, 1820, accompanied by a stanch friend, the artist Joseph
Severn. On this voyage, Keats wrote a sonnet which proved to be his
swan song:--

"Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores."

While he lay on his sick bed in Rome, he said: "I feel the flowers
growing over me." In February, 1821, he died, at the age of
twenty-five years and four months. On the modest stone which marks his
grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, there was placed at his
request: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." His most
appropriate epitaph is Shelley's _Adonais_.

[Illustration: GRAVE OF KEATS, ROME.]

Poems.--In 1817 he published his first poems in a thin volume, which
did not attract much attention, although it contained two excellent
sonnets: _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_ and _On the
Grasshopper and Cricket_, which begins with the famous line:--

"The poetry of earth is never dead."

We may also find in this volume such lines of promise as:--

"Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown
The reading of an ever changing tale."

A year later, his long poem, _Endymion_, appeared. The inner purpose
of this poetic romance is to show the search of the soul for absolute
Beauty. The first five lines are a beautiful exposition of his poetic
creed. _Endymion_, however, suffers from immaturity, shown in boyish
sentimentality, in a confusion of details, and in an overabundance of
ornament. This poem met with a torrent of abuse. One critic even
questioned whether Keats was the real name of the author, adding, "we
almost doubt whether any man in his senses would put his real name to
such a rhapsody." Keats showed himself a better critic than the
reviewers. It is unusual for a poet to