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Updated: June 28, 2025
In all this, however, there was a solitary drawback: there were few Englishmen at Rome who knew Keats's works, and I could scarcely persuade any one to make the effort to read them, such was the prejudice against him as a poet; but when his gravestone was placed, with his own expressive line, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water," then a host started up, not of admirers, but of scoffers, and a silly jest was often repeated in my hearing, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water, and his works in milk and water"; and this I was condemned to hear for years repeated, as though it had been a pasquinade; but I should explain that it was from those who were not aware that I was the friend of Keats.
Isabella indeed was finished by April, 1818; but Hyperion was not relinquished till late in 1819, and the Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia were probably not even begun till 1819. See p, 96 as to Shelley's under-rating of Keats's age. He must have supposed that Keats was only about twenty years old at the date when Endymion was completed. The correct age was twenty-two.
The classic story of Endymion being the subject of Keats's principal poem, I have introduced a young Roman shepherd sleeping against the head-stone with his flock about him, whilst the moon from behind the pyramid illuminates his figure and serves to realize the poet's favorite theme in the presence of his grave.
I do not deny that prose can do it, but when it does it, it is hardly to be called prose, for it is inspired. Indeed this same episode of Ruth in exile has inspired two splendid passages of European verse, of which it is difficult to say which is the more national, and therefore the greatest, Victor Hugo's in the Legende des Siecles or Keats's astounding four lines.
which he is not fit even to think of. He cannot read Keats's 'Nightingale, but for quite another reason. What arouses 'thoughts too deep for tears' in the hale and strong is to the sick as the sinking for an artesian well. 'The Chelsea Waterworks, as Mr. Samuel Weller observed of Mr.
I cannot but quote what follows, the tribute to Keats's kindness, to the most endearing quality our nature possesses; the quality that was Scott's in such a winning degree, that was so marked in Moliere, "He, who is gone, was one of the very kindest friends I ever possessed, and yet he was not kinder, perhaps, to me than to others.
That's the solid part of it really, and no one can deprive you of that, whatever happens." We were discussing Keats and his premature death. Someone had said that, beside being one of the best, he was also one of the most promising of poets; and Father Payne had remarked that reading Keats's letters made him feel more directly in the presence of a man of genius than any other book he knew.
And in like manner, the poet may turn from the world of action to the world of repose, and portray Nature as enfolding and subduing the human element in his picture. In Keats's "Ode to Autumn," Shelley's "Autumn," in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper," Browning's "Where the Mayne Glideth," we find poets absorbed in the external scene or object and striving to paint it.
side by side with the line of Theocritus by which it was suggested: we get at the same moment a good specimen both of the conventional and of the Greek way of handling nature. But from our own poetry we may get specimens of the Greek way of handling nature, as well as of the conventional: for instance, Keats's:
I worked in other ways also; often accompanied my walks with dialogs and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory. It was so Keats learned, and there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned." What, then, is the essential training necessary to the nice handling of words?
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