All lovely tales that we have heard or read.”
I might cite page on page from Keats, and yet hold your attention; there is something so beguiling in his witching words; and his pictures are finished—with only one or two or three dashes of his pencil. Thus we come upon—
“Swelling downs, where sweet air stirs
Blue harebells lightly, and where prickly furze
Buds lavish gold.”
And again our ear is caught with—
“Rustle of the reapéd corn,
And sweet birds antheming the morn.”
Well, this young master of song goes to Italy, too—not driven, like Byron, by hue and cry, or like Shelley, restless for change (from Chancellor’s courts) and for wider horizons—but running from the disease which has firm grip upon him, and which some three years after Shelley’s going kills the poet of the Endymion at Rome. His ashes lie in the Protestant burial-ground there—under the shadow of the pyramid of Caius Cestius. Every literary traveller goes to see the grave, and to spell out the words he wanted inscribed there:
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”