an states.

[Sidenote: Lord Byron's Greek lyrics]

The sympathy with the Greeks was most pronounced in England. There the
stirring lyrics of Lord Byron had reached the height of their popularity.
His songs of Greece and Greek freedom were justly regarded as among his
best. It was but a short time before this that the poet, to use his own
phrase, had awakened one morning to find himself famous. Now his Greek
songs were hailed by the whole world as classics. Notable among them were
the "Isles of Greece," embodied in the third canto of his "Don Juan" with
the famous stanza:

The mountains look on Marathon--
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone
I dreamed that Greece might still be free.

And the equally celebrated lines from "The Bride of Abydos":

Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime?
Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,
Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime!

[Sidenote: Death of Keats]

[Sidenote: Byron's satire]

[Sidenote: Keats's work]

In English literary annals this year was marked furthermore by the death of
John Keats. He was but twenty-five, still in the first flush of his genius.
Keats was buried in Rome, where he died. On his gravestone is the epitaph
composed by himself: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." It was
generally assumed in England that the poet's death was caused by his
anguish over the merciless criticisms of "Blackwood's Magazine" and the
"Quarterly Review." Lord Byron was unkind enough to exploit this notion in
his "Don Juan":

John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great
If not intelligible, without Greek
Contrived to talk about the gods of late
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate;
'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.

As a matter of fact Keats died of consumption. The ravages of this disease
in his case were accelerated by his feverish passion for poetry, his love
affair with Fanny Brawne, financial embarrassments, and only to a slight
extent by the inevitable disappointment arising from adverse criticisms.
What Byron did for modern Greece in England, Keats may be said to have done
for ancient Greece. The beautiful songs of Greece, embodied in "Endymion"
and