in this nineteenth century. He has set his stamp upon many a follower, and has influenced the thought of latterday poetry even more directly than Wordsworth himself. Wordsworth has had a wider influence upon the thought of the century, Shelley a more personal one upon individual characters.

The names of Shelley and Keats are often coupled, partly, no doubt, because they were of nearly the same age, partly also because Shelley in the "Adonais" so passionately bewailed the younger poet's death; but during Keats's life-time the two men saw little of each other. Apparently Keats half distrusted the brilliant, untamable iconoclast, who fought so desperate a fight with society, trying, it seemed, to batter down the good with the bad, and believing in the perfectibility of man. Keats himself knew nothing of such championship. strongest element of his early life was his love for his own family, and as his affection was intense so it was narrow. He had no natural interest in the problems of humanity.

The

It is hardly easier in his case than in Shelley's to guess the sources of his genius. Tradition says that his father, a London stable-keeper, came from Devonshire. His mother had a reputation for wit and talent. Certainly, both his parents must have had more intelligence and ambition than most people in their station, for the children were sent to a good school out in the country. Both parents died, however, while Keats and his brothers were still young.

At school, when Keats was not fighting the bigger boys,

he was dreaming away his time among books of Greek mythology. He knew them by heart. He read all the books on history, travel, and fiction that he could find; but he was not studious. It was not till after he had left school and was apprenticed to a surgeon that he felt a serious drawing toward literature. Then the reading of Spenser roused him. He "ramped" through "The Faery Queen" with delight, eagerly seizing upon any fine epithet or vivid bit of imagery, and soon began to imitate the stanza. Before his term of apprenticeship was over, he quarrelled with his master, and though he studied in the hospitals for two years, he finally gave himself uureservedly to poetry. His first volume of poems appeared in 1817, when he was twenty-two years old.

For the next two years his power steadily grew, till sorrow and trouble and sickness destroyed his energies. In 1818 he was nursing his brother Tom, who was dying of consumption. The next year he was himself attacked by the hereditary disease. In the meantime he was harassed by want of money, the ample portion left by his grandfather having been so badly managed and so poorly accounted for, that the children did not even know of the existence of part of it till after two of them had died.

In addition to these disturbances, he fell so passionately in love that his mind lost its vigor. To the lover of Keats the saddest thing about his life is, not that it was so short, but that love should have so unmanned him. Even if he had been well, it would have been difficult for him to wait and work till he could marry. His passion only hastened the end. He died at Rome in 1821, and was buried in the little Protestant cemetery by the pyramid of Cestius.

Keats has been called an Elizabethan because he so delighted in the physical beauty of outward nature; but his feeling was a sense of luxury in the voluptuousness and exuberance of nature, which is far from the active, keen enjoyment of the Elizabethans. Indeed, his early poems show so much sensuous weakness, that there is small wonder his work was not well received. "Endymion," his second volume, called forth a brutal review from the Quarterly, which was long popularly supposed to have caused his death; and another only less harsh, from Blackwood.

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In reality Keats was far too manly to be seriously injured by the Quarterly. He acknowledged that " Endymion was but the sloughing off of youthful feelings. He knew that he must get rid of these ideas in order to grow into something stronger. In the last three years his life he gained that power to prune which he lacked in "Endymion." What he wrote showed reserve force as well as great beauty of imagery.

of

He did not write of the practical every-day matters which appealed to Wordsworth, nor did unfathomable intellectual beauty attract him as it did Shelley. His interest lay not in life around him, nor in things beyond him, but in classic legends,-stories which had already received a halo from past literatures.

In another direction, also, Keats was unlike the others. His theory was that a poet should have no personality of his own, but should absorb the moods of everyone around him; should give himself up wholly to influences outside of himself, because only thus can he feel the beauty and the truth of the world. This was very different from the aim of Wordsworth to put himself into

the right mood, and then receive what nature had to tell, sinking deeper into contemplation in himself in order to interpret aright; or from the eager curiosity of Shelley consciously lifting the veil which covers the secrets of

nature.

A third point of variance lay in his attitude toward his calling. Wordsworth wrote because he had something to teach; Shelley felt that the only way for him to lighten the burden of the world was by using his poetic gift; both wanted to help humanity. Keats adopted poetry because it was life to himself. He could not exist without it. The pleasure or profit of the world was of little importance to him, if he had once satisfied his nature by creating something beautiful.

Doubtless, had he lived, other motives would have developed in him. He began toward the end to appreciate the power for good which he might wield, and wrote of studies to be undertaken in order to fit himself for the mission of teaching mankind. That side of his character, however, had not time to mature. He died at the age of twenty-five, leaving behind him, besides his crude, early work, a few odes and poems which have never been surpassed for delicacy of touch and richness of imagery, and the mighty fragment of " Hyperion," begun on so lofty a scale that it could no more have been finished than Cole

ridge's "Christabel." The promise that the future would show wider sympathies with no less perfection of form was never fulfilled.

Of all the tragedies in the lives of the poets of Wordsworth's era, that of Byron seems both the most and the

least pathetic; most pathetic because in his life of thirtysix years he had less real love and happiness than even the men who died younger; least so, because his genius seems to have been not so much in need of happiness to stimulate it to action. The best poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley and, to a certain extent, of Keats, was all written under the spell of domestic love; Byron wrote his best after he had been driven with reviling from England, when home-life was forever closed upon him, when he knew that his daughter was not even allowed to see his portrait. But the old Berserker blood flowed in his veins; perhaps he was more truly happy when fighting the world than when at peace with it.

His family had both good and evil elements in it. It was very old he could trace it back to before the Conquest and he was very proud of it; as for his parentshis father was a scamp who ran through the fortunes of two wives and deserted them; his mother was a vixen. For himself a defect in the shape of one foot was the cause of much irritable sensitiveness, and he was as effectually spoiled, by the alternate petting and violence of his mother, as it was possible for a boy to be. All the good influences of Harrow and of Cambridge were not enough to tame a creature so erratic by inheritance and early treatment.

When he left the University and had taken his seat in the House of Lords, he travelled for two years through Spain, Greece, and Turkey, returning with the first two cantos of "Childe Harold " in his pocket. For the next four years he was the darling of London society. "Childe Harold," and the romantic tales which followed it, just suited the public taste; he had all the admiration