Agnes_,
with its wealth of mediaeval adornment. In the _Ode to Autumn_, and _Ode
to a Nightingale_, the Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the
warmer hues of romance.
There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats's life. The
seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent
genius, but he knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must
die
Before high-piled books in charactry
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain.
His disease was aggravated, possibly, by the stupid brutality with which
the reviewers had treated _Endymion_; and certainly by the hopeless love
which devoured him. "The very thing which I want to live most for," he
wrote, "will be a great occasion of my death. If I had any chance of
recovery, this passion would kill me." In the autumn of 1820, his
disease gaining apace, he went on a sailing vessel to Italy,
accompanied by a single friend, a young artist named Severn. The change
was of no avail, and he died at Rome a few weeks after, in his
twenty-sixth year.
Keats was, above all things, the _artist_, with that love of the
beautiful and that instinct for its reproduction which are the artist's
divinest gifts. He cared little about the politics and philosophy of his
day, and he did not make his poetry the vehicle of ideas.
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