ambition. Now let us see how rumor, aided by Keats' reticence, added high colors to the tragedy of his death.

During that autumn Severn saw him occasionally and noted his strained eyes, his face haggard with apathy and despair. Haydon wrote in his journal that Keats would come to his studio, sit for hours without saying a word, and that he finally took to prolonged dissipation for relief. This last is strange. It is supported by no one else. Keats is always spoken of as a man of very temperate habits. It is surely incredible that he could have been, as Haydon says, "for six weeks scarcely sober," when he was assiduously nursing his brother during the autumn, and when, during the following winter, he was in the first transports of his love for Fanny Brawne. But whether dissipated or not, from a combination of causes he was noticeably despondent. The moods of depression gave rise to rumors; he threatened suicide; his mental suffering caused a rupture of blood-vessels in the lungs ; the ridicule of the reviewers had driven him insane. After his death these rumors passed to Shelley in Italy. With Hotspur indignation, he passed them on to Byron. Byron's doggerel and satiric stanza in "Don Juan" gave a quotable

form and wide circulation to the fiction that fictio Keats was killed by abusive criticism. The poet's closest friends confirmed it for posterity. For when they set the headpiece for his tomb, ignoring or misconceiving his last request, they put on the stone: —

THIS GRAVE

CONTAINS ALL THAT WAS MORTAL

OF A

YOUNG ENGLISH POET

WHO

ON HIS DEATH BED

IN THE BITTERNESS OF HIS HEART

AT THE MALICIOUS POWER OF HIS ENEMIES

DESIRED

THIS PHRASE TO BE ENGRAVED ON HIS TOMBSTONE

HERE LIES ONE

WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER

There the legend continues to this day, in letters of marble, misrepresenting the fate of the man beneath. Brown is chiefly responsible. He repented before he died, but did not repair the mistake.

Such in brief is the history of the apochryphal tragedy of Keats' assassination by the reviews. We shall not here anticipate the last moments of Keats or interpret properly his dying request.

But let us look squarely at the facts contemporary with this year as sufficient for the present.

He was bruised in his dignity; he was stung in his acute sensibilities; he was driven into temporary moods of self-distrust. For a time he considered abandoning poetry and turning again to medicine or emigrating to America. The suffering was in the morbid brooding of the imagination. Poets are especially subject to it. The faculty that creates is a faculty that suffers. The imagination is the poet's rack of anguish as well as his chamber of joy. The test of Keats' character is not the pain, but the reaction from the blows. Criticism did not break or even bend his will. Criticism made him more cautious, more independent. He became a spiritual anchorite. He was drawn into a closer communion with that invisible company which was always the highest source of his inspiration, "the eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty and the Memory of Great Men." With these he lost his eagerness for fame and put aside the vainglory of the world. "My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk."

Evidence that is recorded without any thought of future use is the best evidence. The letters that Keats wrote to his friends (not for publi

cation or posterity) reveal the truth. Consider some of these and see what was happening in the depths of his nature while the reviews were supposed to be driving him insane. The attacks came in August and September; these are the reactions from the blows.

September 21st. "I wish I could say Tom was any better. His identity presses upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out — and although I intended to have given some time to study alone, I am obliged to write and plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice and his feebleness

live now in a continual fever."

so that I

September 22d. "I never was in love

— yet the voice and shape of a Woman has haunted

me these two days.

There is an awful

warmth about my heart like a load of Immortality. Poor Tom- that woman

and Poetry

were ringing changes in my senses." October 9th. "I begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakness

praise

or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own Works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what 'Blackwood's' or the

'Quarterly' could possibly inflict. . . . I will write independently I have written independently without judgment. I may write independently, and with judgment, hereafter. The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. I was never afraid of failure; for

October 14th. "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death."

October 16th. "I shall send you more than letters I mean a tale - which I must begin. on account of the activity of my mind; of its inability to remain at rest.'

October 25th. "My solitude is sublime. The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window-pane are my children. The mighty abstract idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. I feel more and more every day as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me and serve my Spirit the office which is equivalent to a king's