elp his brother. Then, when he
could afford it, he would return to poetry.

Accordingly he came back to London, but his health was breaking down,
and with it his resolution. He tried to re-write _Hyperion_, which he
felt had been written too much under the influence of Milton and in 'the
artist's humour'. The same independence of spirit which he had shown in
the publication of _Endymion_ urged him now to abandon a work the style
of which he did not feel to be absolutely his own. The re-cast he wrote
in the form of a vision, calling it _The Fall of Hyperion_, and in so
doing he added much to his conception of the meaning of the story. In no
poem does he show more of the profoundly philosophic spirit which
characterizes many of his letters. But it was too late; his power was
failing and, in spite of the beauty and interest of some of his
additions, the alterations are mostly for the worse.

Whilst _The Fall of Hyperion_ occupied his evenings his mornings were
spent over a satirical fairy-poem, _The Cap and Bells_, in the metre of
the _Faerie Queene_. This metre, however, was ill-suited to the subject;
satire was not natural to him, and the poem has little intrinsic merit.

Neither this nor the re-cast of _Hyperion_ was finished when, in
February, 1820, he had an attack of illness in which the first definite
symptom of consumption appeared. Brown tells how he came home on the
evening of Thursday, February 3rd, in a state of high fever, chilled
from having ridden outside the coach on a bitterly cold day. 'He mildly
and instantly yielded to my request that he should go to bed . . . On
entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly
coughed, and I heard him say--"that is blood from my mouth". I went
towards him: he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet.
"Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood." After regarding
it steadfastly he looked up in my face with a calmness of expression
that I can never forget, and said, "I know the colour of that blood;--it
is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop of
blood is my death warrant;--I must die."'

He lived for another year, but it was one long dying: he himself called
it his 'posthumous life'.

Keats was one of the most charming of letter-writers. He had that rare
quality of entering sympathetically into the mind of the friend to whom
he was writing, so that his letters reveal to us much of the character
o