Consider the situation: A man sensitive to the utmost degree, confronted by a poetic ideal the very service of which took a "virtue" out of him; a man whose brother had just died of consumption; a man himself already in weak health—nothing, in short, but nerves and imagination left. The complete and overwhelming irony of his fate, and, as if by an impossibly deeper irony, the nervous temperament with which he must wage his battle against such odds, wholly explain, if not excuse, his occasional loss of self-control. His energy has already been consumed by his passion for poetry. And now he falls in love with a woman, not playfully, nor just "deeply," but with all his nervous imagination. Is it not natural enough that he should write "I cannot breathe without you"? Then the foreseen tuberculosis and poverty and the utter loss of all cherished hopes except poetic immortality— take hold of him: the wreck is complete. Yet - and this is the point for remark he writes in March, 1820 (after the first serious illness) with a delightful touch of humor: "There is a great difference between going off in warm blood like Romeo and making one's exit like a frog in a frost." On the whole, he bore up with admirable courage.

To return to the course of events which introduce the last chapter of his life. In the summer of 1818, Keats, after seeing his brother George, with a newly married wife, off for America, made a walking tour, with his friend Brown, through the English Lake District and Scotland. A letter to Reynolds gives an amusing account of his visit to the cottage of Burns. Here he met "a mahogany-faced old Jackass who knew Burns. . . . His gab hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet." During his tour Keats underwent

great physical strain. In the Isle of Mull he caught a violent cold, from the effects of which he never quite recovered. It was the following winter, when he was making the acquaintance of Fanny Brawne, that he suffered continually from sore throat. In December, when consumption had carried off his brother Tom, he was induced to move to Brown's home, Wentworth Place, Hampstead. After a year of recurring colds he met his fatal illness on February 3, 1820. On seeing a drop of blood from his mouth, he said quietly to Brown: "It is arterial blood-I cannot be deceived in that color. . . . I must die.”

It is interesting to note that Keats's best poems were written in the year preceding his serious illness. He had served his apprenticeship in Endymion; the volume of 1820, containing Lamia, Isabella, the famous Odes, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Hyperion are of his maturity. In two years, with the coming sickness imminent upon him, he completely answered and silenced the reviewers, not by vituperation or satire, but by genuine work which bore its own fruit. No comments of contemporaries offer such abundant testimony as does this 1820 edition of poems to the real vigor of his character and the nobleness of his ideals. He served poetry truly not for a "mawkish popularity." What he might have done had he lived to even greater maturity must ever be sad conjecture.

Much of the best work on the poems was done at Winchester, where Keats, having willfully absented himself from Hampstead and Fanny Brawne, spent the fall of 1819. After his return to London he did little work except for an attempt at recasting the fragment Hyperion. Soon the disease was upon him. During the spring

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. . . . 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