'So the two brothers and their murdered man
Rode past fair Florence;'
and with the description, at once delicate and gorgeous, of Agnes praying beneath the painted window."
This must have been immediately before the young poet quitted England in the vain quest of health. There is a very affecting passage in Mr. Hunt's brief memoir of him, which shows what was the state of mind of this fine young poet at this crisis. The hunter had stricken him, death was dealing with him, and the pain of affections unassured of a return was helping his other enemies to pull him down. "Seeing him once," says Mr. Hunt, "change countenance in a manner more alarming than usual, as he stood silently eyeing the country out of the window, I pressed him to let me know how he felt, in order that he might enable me to do what I could for him; upon which he said that his feelings were almost more than he could bear, and he feared for his senses. I proposed that we should take a coach and ride about the country together, to vary, if possible, the immediate impression, which was sometimes all that was formidable, and would come to nothing. He acquiesced, and was restored to himself. It was, nevertheless, on the same day, sitting on the bench in Well Walk, at Hampstead, nearest the heath, that he told me, with unaccustomed tears in his eyes, that 'his heart was breaking.' A doubt, however, was upon him at that time, which he afterward had reason to know was groundless; and during his residence at the last house that he occupied before he went abroad, he was at times more than tranquil."
His house, it appears, was in Wentworth Place, Downshire Hill, Hampstead, by Pond-street, and at the next door lived the young lady to whom he was engaged. Mr. Hunt accompanied Keats and this young lady to the place of embarkation in a coach, and saw them part. It was a most trying moment. Neither of them entertained a hope to see each other again in life, yet each endeavored to subdue the feelings of such a moment to the retention of outward composure. Keats was accompanied on his voyage by that excellent artist, Mr. Severn, and who, to quote again the same competent authority, possessed all that could recommend him for a companion: old acquaintanceship, great animal spirits, active tenderness, and a mind capable of appreciating that of a poet. They first went to Naples, and afterward to Rome, where they occupied the same house, at the corner of the Piazza di Spagna. Mr. Severn made several sketches of Keats, both on the voyage and at Rome, and, while there, finished a portrait of him for Mr., now Lord Jeffery, who had spoken handsomely of him in the Edinburgh Review. At Rome, on the 27th of December, 1820, as already stated, John Keats died in the arms of his friend, completely worn out and longing for release. How the circumstance of this life-weariness reminds us of his longing for death in his inimitable Ode to the Nightingale!
"Oh for a draught of vintage that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green;
Dance and Provençal song, and sunburned mirth!
Oh for a beaker full of the warm south,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth!
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim;
"Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret,
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs;
Where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies;
Where still to think is to be full of sorrow,
And leaden-eyed despairs:
Where beauty can not keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow."
"A little before he died, he said that 'he felt the daisies growing over him.' But he made a still more touching remark respecting his epitaph. 'If any,' said he, 'were put over him, he wished it to consist of nothing but these words: Here lies one whose name was writ in water;' so little did he think of the more than promise he had given; of the fine and lasting things he had added to the stock of poetry. The physicians expressed their astonishment that he had held out so long; the lungs turning out, on inspection, to have been almost obliterated. They said he must have lived upon the mere strength of the spirit within him. He was interred in the English burying-ground at Rome, near the monument of Caius Cestius, where his friend and poetical mourner, Mr. Shelley, was so shortly to join him."
Such is the brief but deeply interesting account of John Keats, drawn mostly from the written narrative, and partly from the conversation of his true friend and fellow-poet. It is not possible to close it in more just or appropriate words than those of this admiring but discriminating friend: "So much for the mortal life of as true a man of genius as these latter times have seen; one of those who are too genuine and too original to be properly appreciated at first, but whose time for applause will infallibly arrive with the many, and has already begun in all poetical quarters."