and summer it grew intermittently worse; he was told another winter in England would kill him ; and he finally consented to go to Italy - though he said it was “like marching up to a battery." A brave and generous companion was found in Joseph Severn, his artist friend, who sailed with him on September 18, 1820. On the boat was written his last poem, the famous sonnet beginning, "Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art."

The two travelers arrived at Naples late in October and journeyed thence to Rome, where Keats soon grew too weak even to write letters. A note of November 1, written to Brown, is full of his torture. At home he had kept to himself the consuming fire of his passion; now he breaks out in despair: "I can bear to die I cannot bear to leave her. O God! God! God! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my traveling cap scalds my head. . head. . . . Despair is forced upon me as a habit. . . . Oh, Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast." In his last letter (November 30) he speaks, with a flash of the old humor, of "leading a posthumous existence." Towards the end he would not hear of recovery, but longed for the ease of death-in a manner reminiscent of his line,

"I have been half in love with easeful Death."

Once he said, "I feel the flowers growing over me," and another time gave for his epitaph,

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

On the 23d of February, 1821, he died. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, near the pyramid of Gaius Sestius.

The sensitiveness of Keats should be especially remembered, for it was not only stronger than that of any other great English poet, but it underlay all his actions ; it was responsible for his weakness and his strength. It gave rise to his youthful mawkishness and to his "horrid morbidity of temperament; " but it gave rise, too, to many noble qualities which easily outweigh these defects, to his eager affection, to his generosity, and chiefly to an ambition which soon sought a far higher service than popular applause. It is indeed worth noting that Keats overcame his youthful mawkishness more surely than men who had less cause for melancholy. This sensitiveness, it must not be forgotten, was responsible for his genuine devotion to an ideal-a devotion that produced the little but great poetry which has put him, as he humbly hoped, among the English poets after his death. "He is," says Matthew Arnold, "he is with Shakespeare." Many who have pitied the poor, inspired weakling of their imaginations, the Keats killed by the reviews, give up reluctantly the tragic story they have believed. Fortunately for English poetry, John Keats was not so mawkish as some of his admirers; he had "flint and iron" in him. There is, even then, surely enough tragedy to his life; and rather than a pathetic weakness to mourn, there is something infinitely greater, - an enduring strength and nobleness to admire.

THE VICTORIAN AGE

THE chief characteristic of the Victorian Age, which, roughly speaking, may be placed between 1830 and 1900, was variety of interest. No other time except the Elizabethan has been so full of enterprise. But the England of Victoria, though it possessed the vigor and resourcefulness, lacked the freshness and imagination of the England of Elizabeth; hence, instead of being an age of discovery and poetry, it was rather one of invention and prose. If "More beyond" was the motto of the aspiring Elizabethans, "More within" may be said to have been the motto of the inquiring Victorians.

The original impulse to this age of great development came, of course, from the French Revolution, which broke down the barriers of superstition and absolute monarchy, and demanded new political, religious, and social organization. At first, however, the influence in England was seen only in the visionary poetry of the Romanticists. The first practical expression of the new spirit was the Reform Bill in 1832, which secured for England representative government. From then on interest in political advancement was widespread, the more so since England, in her colonies, became a world-empire. A little after the first political ferment came the religious conflict, brought on largely by the scientific study of evolution. Science destroyed the old systems, threw many people into confusion and agnostic despair, and finally forced on the

world a new and larger, less dogmatic faith. The third most striking change, the social, appeared in a great improvement in the material comfort of the people. More and better schools grew up; cities became cleaner, better lighted; steam and electricity promoted intercourse of men and nations. This development, like the religious, may be almost wholly attributed to science. Urged on by its inquiring spirit, culture spread amazingly; four of the six English universities were established in the nineteenth century; study was for the first time put on an accurate, "historical" basis; the cheapness of paper now put books, magazines, and newspapers within the reach of all; and the "general reader" sprang into being. Yet, at the same time, the commercialism which the new mechanical interests inspired grew out of all proportion. The prosperity of the people was also its curse, for it brought about a narrow eagerness for mere luxury and a consequent lowness of artistic and moral ideals; it came perilously near making man into a machine. Of this the best evidence is the atrocious architecture of the years from 1850 to 1875 and the absorption of the majority of men in mere money-making business. If Macaulay reflects the progress and success of his times, Carlyle and Ruskin, it must not be forgotten, are strong in disgust at the way such success was attained; their cry is for spiritual as well as material progress.

This age of diversity and scientific inquiry had two chief literary expressions both in prose: (1) The novel, which reached its maturity in Victorian days, analyzed and expressed far more than any other kind of writing the complexity of a very various life. Equally significant has been the perfecting of the short story,

a form of fiction peculiarly adapted to the hurried, complicated life of the nineteenth century. (2) The essay, which through magazines reached a wide reading public, gave a medium to most of the great writers on scientific, religious, moral, social, and historical subjects.

The poetry of the Victorian Age was generally surpassed, especially in bulk, by the prose. In two instances, however, those of Tennyson and Browning, it clearly held its own. This period, though not so essentially a poetic age as the preceding one of Romanticism, offered much, especially in the realm of spiritual conflict, for poetic expression. There was, too, a vastness of enterprise, a universality of interest which called for great poetry. Yet, with the exception of a few master-hands, most of the work was self-conscious, imitative, or unimaginative.