I can imagine the road then, with only a few houses bordering it, each in its setting of greensward and evergreens, almost impinging on the green slope of South Hill, and leading round by Sol’s Row, where Wilkie at one time had lodgings, and where a great nobleman and his wife and daughter called upon him with a proposal for him to paint the portrait of one or both the ladies, to which the unsophisticated Scotchman bluntly replied that ‘he would think about it.’

Sol’s Row then looked out upon a wide stretch of meadow-land, beautiful with divisional elms and other trees, and had a fair-sized pond in the foreground.

It was with his friend Brown, as I have before said, that Keats visited Scotland, but had not strength left to attempt it a second season. He occupied the front sitting-room in his friend’s house, and here he wrote the greater part of ‘Hyperion,’ and the Odes to ‘Indolence’ and to ‘Psyche,’ ‘On a Grecian Urn,’ and to ‘A Nightingale.’ Here also he commenced the unfinished ‘Cap and Bells,’ and wrote ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’; and here, at a party given by the Dilkes, he met Miss Brawne, the lady who ‘was not Cleopatra, but was at least Charmian,’ and who, with her fine eyes and fine manners, and her rich Eastern looks, was fated to play so large a part in the inner tragedy of his short life.

The lady whom I have just now alluded to, who knew Miss Brawne till she herself was fifteen years of age, when the latter left England, describes her as a very striking, dignified-looking woman, fair, but pale, with bright dark eyes and light brown hair. She remembers her mother saying that Fanny Brawne was a lovely girl, but that she had lost her colour in an illness she had after her engagement with Keats was broken off—‘that mad boy Keats,’ as they used to call him.

When subsequently the Dilkes moved to Westminster, Mrs. Brawne and her daughter took their house, so that the lovers must have seen each other daily. Keats resided with his friend from 1818 to 1819, when, in order to be near Leigh Hunt, who had left the Vale of Health and was living at Kentish Town, he removed there. Afterwards, when Hunt left England for Italy, Keats made trial of a cheap lodging in College Street, Westminster, where he only remained a week, returning instinctively to Hampstead, where the Brawnes, from womanly compassion, received him (he was then hopelessly ill), and tenderly nursed him in the white bedroom, with the white curtains and white quilt, in which Haydon, the painter, saw him, the bright hectic of his flushed cheeks the only relief to the surrounding wanness. Here he remained a month, the last month of his life in England, and Hampstead and his lady-love possessed it.

If ever a spot of earth could claim as its own one whose charmed gift of poesy has impenetrated and irradiated the whole sphere of intellectual life, surely Hampstead may call Keats her own.

When the Brawnes left Wentworth Place, an actress of some eminence—a Miss Chester, who held the post of Reader to George IV.—took both houses, threw them into one, and called her home Lawn Bank, by which name it continued to be called till inquiries began to be made for Wentworth Place, which readers of the ‘Northern Heights of London’ will remember William Howitt could not find. The name has now been restored.

Upon this house the Society of Arts placed a memorial tablet of terra-cotta, inscribed:

JOHN KEATS,
Poet,
Lived in this House.
Born 1795. Died 1821.

Not a very clearly-expressed inscription, since anyone ignorant of the poet’s history might naturally infer that he had not only lived, but had been born and had died here. However, this is better than barren forgetfulness, and now John Street has its visitors, as Flask Road had in times gone by, but with far livelier interest, for he who lived and wrote some of his most lovely poems within these walls, to paraphrase his own prophecy, ‘lives among the English poets after death.’