Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain.
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
Shelley (Adonaïs, an Elegy on Keats, XL).
This verse is engraved on Shelley’s own monument in the Priory Church at Christchurch, Hampshire.
A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back and said, “Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!” “There is death in that hand,” I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.