enses--it is delicious. For three
weeks he has lived on it, sometimes taking a pint and a half in a
day.

"_February 22._ This morning, by the pale daylight, the change in
him frightened me: he has sunk in the last three days to a most
ghastly look.... He opens his eyes in great doubt and horror;
but, when they fall upon me, they close gently, open quietly, and
close again, till he sinks to sleep.

"_February 27._ He is gone. He died with the most perfect
ease--he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, about four, the
approaches of death came on. 'Severn--I--lift me up. I am
dying--I shall die easy. Don't be frightened: be firm, and thank
God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed
boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he
gradually sank into death, so quiet that I still thought he
slept. I cannot say more now. I am broken down by four nights'
watching, no sleep since, and my poor Keats gone. Three days
since the body was opened: the lungs were completely gone. The
doctors could not imagine how he had lived these two months. I
followed his dear body to the grave on Monday [February 26th],
with many English.... The letters I placed in the coffin with my
own hand."

No words of mine shall be added here to tarnish upon the mirror of
memory this image of a sacred death and a sacred friendship.

CHAPTER IV.

We have now reached the close of a melancholy history--that of the
extinction, in a space of less than twenty-six years, of a bright life
foredoomed by inherited disease. We turn to another subject--the
intellectual development and the writings of Keats, what they were, and
how they were treated. Here again there are some sombre tints.

A minute anecdote, apparently quite authentic, shows that a certain
propensity to the jingle of rhyme was innate in Keats: Haydon is our
informant. "An old lady (Mrs. Grafty, of Craven Street, Finsbury) told
his brother George--when, in reply to her question what John was doing,
he told her he had determined to become a poet--that this was very odd;
because when he could just speak, instead of answering questions put to
him, he would always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and then
laugh." This, however, is the only rhyming-anecdote that we hear of
Keats's childhood or mere boyhood: there is nothing to show that at
school he made the faintest attempt at verse-spinning