manner and his abundant conversation. His voice, very shrill, was eager and piercing rather than discordant.

During Pisan days Shelley's genius continued to thrive. In the first year, 1820, he wrote the charming Letter to Maria Gisborne, the Witch of Atlas, The Sensitive Plant, and his fanciful version of Edipus. The following year produced some of his best work: Epipsychidion, inspired by Emilia Viviani, a beautiful Italian girl cloistered against her will, a girl into whose clear spirit he read his intellectual, unattainable ideal of woman; Adonais, the surpassing elegy on John Keats, by far the most completely finished of Shelley's poems; Hellas, an imaginative "improvise," he calls it, in celebration of Liberty; and an essay, the Defence of Poetry, in which he showed his power of writing noble prose. During the first six months of 1822, the last of his life, he wrote three fragments: An Unfinished Drama; Charles the First, a drama; and The Triumph of Life, in terza rima, a poem which gives presage of a clearer, more tranquil maturity. Sprinkled through the three years are many fragmentary translations from Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and German, and a host of shorter pieces such as The Cloud, The Skylark, Arethusa, Ode to Liberty, Hymn to Pan, and Ode to Naples, -poems full of his "lyrical cry.

The last days were now at hand. In the summer of 1822 the Shelleys and the Williamses took a small house, the Casa Magni, near Lerici, on the Gulf of Spezia. They procured a sailing skiff, which they dubbed Don Juan, and Shelley, ignorant of seamanship but enthusiastic over sailing, spent most of his time on the water with Williams, who knew something of navigation. One day, early in July, they put forth, Williams

at the helm and Shelley with his book, for Leghorn, where Leigh Hunt had just arrived. On the 8th, after happy days with Hunt, the two set sail again for Lerici -into the teeth of a storm. Through days of misery Mary and Jane watched and waited. Finally, on July 19, the ill news was brought them by Trelawny; the bodies had been washed ashore Shelley with a manuscript of the Indian Serenade and two volumes in his pocket, Sophocles and Keats, the latter turned back as in the act of reading. The bodies were burned, Hunt, Byron, and Trelawny attending. Shelley's heart, however, withstood the flames, and the intrepid Trelawny snatched it unconsumed from the pyre. The poet's ashes were then collected and buried at Rome, near the grave of Keats. The epitaph, composed by Leigh Hunt, had at first the two simple words, Cor Cordium, but Trelawny added those lines so indelibly characteristic of Shelley and his watery grave:

"Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."

JOHN KEATS

KEATS, whose name will ever be associated with beauty in English poetry, whose devotion to an ideal and remarkable realization thereof in a mere handful of years are unsurpassed in the history of English literature, is especially inspiring as a man. Indeed, one of his friends, Archdeacon Bailey, writes of him as one "whose genius I did not, and do not, more fully admire than I entirely loved the man." And his friend Reynolds says, "He was the sincerest friend, the most lovable associate... that ever lived in this tide of times.'" Of extreme sensitiveness, endowed with a vivid imagination, confronted by poverty, consumption, and a passionate love which could never come to its fulfillment, Keats the man wins followers as readily as Keats the poet.

The son of Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings, and the first of five children, he was born in London on the 29th of October, 1795. His father, first an ostler in the livery stable of Mr. John Jennings of Moorfields, had married his employer's daughter and risen to a position of respectability in his trade, if not, as Lord Houghton would have it, to "the upper ranks of the middle class." It is sufficient, as Lowell points out, that Keats's

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poetical pedigree is of the best, tracing through Spenser to Chaucer, and that Pegasus does not stand at livery in the largest establishments in Moorfields."

In his earliest youth Keats showed signs of a quick and fiery spirit, and, if the enthusiastic but often erro

neous Haydon is to be believed, of a tendency to make verses. The boy had a trick, it was said, of answering questions by making a rhyme to the last word spoken. As a young child, when his mother was very ill, he stood guard at her door with an old sword, and allowed no one to disturb her. At her death, report says, he was so overcome that he hid for days under the master's desk at school.

John, with his younger brothers George and Tom, was sent to the school kept by the Rev. John Clarke at Enfield. Perhaps the most remarkable features of his school-days were his pugnacity and his enduring friendships. He was a little boy and his brother George, of larger limb, often had to take his part; but he possessed, says one of his schoolfellows, "a terrier-like resoluteness." ." Again, he would fight any one morning, noon, and night, his brother among the rest. . . . No one was more popular." Indeed, a schoolmate thought afterwards that Keats as a boy had promised greatness, though rather a military than a poetic. Yet "he was not merely the favorite of all, like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage," writes Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the head master and one of Keats's warmest friends; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him."

At school Keats had the reputation of being a "regular" student, but he received no great education — small Latin and no Greek. Yet so keen was his perception and so great his power of making what he saw and heard his own that he came forth, as did the grammar

schooled boy of Stratford, with a far vaster equipment than many a university man. Soon, under the influence of the somewhat older Clarke, he acquired a love of the English poets-especially of Spenser, whose romance, says Clarke, "he ramped through like a young horse turned into a spring meadow."

It is a little surprising, perhaps, to find this young enthusiastic lover of Chaucer and Spenser leaving Mr. Clarke's in 1810 and apprenticing himself to Mr. Hammond, a surgeon of Edmonton. But the orphaned son of a liveryman must be about learning a trade. He seems later to have quarreled with Mr. Hammond, who allowed the indentures to be canceled; and Keats, at about nineteen, went up to London to study at St. Thomas's and Guy's hospitals. He passed with credit, July, 1815, his examination at Apothecaries' Hall. But his imagination was too keen for the work. "The other day, during the lecture," he once said to Cowden Clarke, "there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairy-land." At the same time the purpose of consecrating his life to poetry was growing upon him. His verses had been praised in a circle of friends; above all, Leigh Hunt, editor, poet, enthusiastic supporter of Liberty and friend of literary aspirants, and Clarke, whose reading of Chapman's Homer with Keats one night in 1816 had called forth the famous sonnet

"Much have I travelled in the realms of gold "

urged him to the new profession. In 1817 he published his first volume of verse, with a dedication to Leigh Hunt in an effusive sonnet.