received
in life was in watching the growth of flowers,' and how another time,
after lying a while quite still, he murmured in some strange prescience
of early death, 'I feel the flowers growing over me.'

But this time-worn stone and these wildflowers are but poor memorials {3}
of one so great as Keats; most of all, too, in this city of Rome, which
pays such honour to her dead; where popes, and emperors, and saints, and
cardinals lie hidden in 'porphyry wombs,' or couched in baths of jasper
and chalcedony and malachite, ablaze with precious stones and metals, and
tended with continual service. For very noble is the site, and worthy of
a noble monument; behind looms the grey pyramid, symbol of the world's
age, and filled with memories of the sphinx, and the lotus leaf, and the
glories of old Nile; in front is the Monte Testaccio, built, it is said,
with the broken fragments of the vessels in which all the nations of the
East and the West brought their tribute to Rome; and a little distance
off, along the slope of the hill under the Aurelian wall, some tall gaunt
cypresses rise, like burnt-out funeral torches, to mark the spot where
Shelley's heart (that 'heart of hearts'!) lies in the earth; and, above
all, the soil on which we tread is very Rome!

As I stood beside the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as
of a Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of Guido's
St. Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown
boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by his evil enemies
to a tree, and though pierced by arrows, raising his eyes with divine,
impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening heavens. And
thus my thoughts shaped themselves to rhyme:

HEU MISERANDE PUER

Rid of the world's injustice and its pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue;
Taken from life while life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian and as foully slain.
No cypress shades his grave, nor funeral yew,
But red-lipped daisies, violets drenched with dew,
And sleepy poppies, catch the evening rain.

O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O saddest poet that the world hath seen!
O sweetest singer of the English land!
Thy name was writ in water on the sand,
But our tears shall keep thy memory green,
And make it flourish like a Basil-tree.

Borne