ion, to reveal--his loftiest hopes
and aspirations, the wide remote prospects seen from the hills of life,
the deep ambitions, the exaltations of spirit, the raptures of art. I
do not mean that one can share these in their fulness; but Keats seems
to have experienced daily and hourly, in his best days, those august
shocks of experience and insight of which any man who loves and
worships art, however fitfully, can register a few. There is a little
picture of Keats, done, I think, after his death by Severn, which
represents him sitting in the tiny parlour of Wentworth Place, with the
window open to the orchard, where, under the plum-tree, he wrote the
_Ode to the Nightingale_. He sits on one chair, with his arm on the
back of another, his hand upon his hair, reading a volume of
Shakespeare with a smile of satisfaction. He is neatly dressed, and has
pumps with bows on his feet. That picture, like the letters, seems to
bring Keats curiously near to life; I always fancy-that Severn must
have had in his mind a charming passage in one of Keats' letters to his
sister Fanny, where he says he would like to have a house with a big
bow-window with some stained glass in it, looking out on the Lake of
Geneva, with a bowl of gold-fish by his side, where he would sit and
read all day, like a portrait of a gentleman reading. The picture is
somehow so characteristic that one feels for a moment in his presence.

Well, what do I deduce from all this? Partly that Keats was a man of
incomparable genius; partly that he was a man whom one could have loved
for himself; partly, too, that one ought not to be ashamed of one's
far-reaching thoughts, if one is fortunate enough to have them, and
that one receives and gives more good by telling them frankly and
unsuspiciously than if one keeps them to oneself for fear of being
thought a fool.

Of course the whole career of Keats opens a door to a host of uneasy
speculations. If the purpose of our Creator is to educate the world on
certain lines, if he desires by the memory and the utterance of men of
high genius to kindle the human spirit to fine and generous dreams and
to the appreciation of beauty, it is terribly hard to discern why he
should have created a spirit so fiery-sweet as that of Keats, and then
cut short his career by a series of hard strokes of misfortune and
disease just when he was finding fullest utterance. One looks round
upon the world, and one sees temperaments of all kinds--relig