40 It may be well said that these wretched men know not what they do.  They scatter their insults and their slanders without heed as to whether the poisoned shaft lights on a heart made callous by many blows, or one, like Keats’s, composed of more penetrable stuff.  One of their associates is, to my knowledge, a most base and unprincipled 45 calumniator.  As to Endymion, was it a poem, whatever might be its defects, to be treated contemptuously by those who had celebrated with various degrees of complacency and panegyric Paris, and Woman and A Syrian Tale, and Mrs. Lefanu, and Mr. Barrett, and Mr. Howard Payne, and a long list of the illustrious 50 obscure?  Are these the men who, in their venal good-nature, presumed to draw a parallel between the Rev. Mr. Milman and Lord Byron?  What gnat did they strain at here, after having swallowed all those camels?  Against what woman taken in adultery dares the foremost of these literary prostitutes to cast his opprobrious stone? 55 Miserable man! you, one of the meanest, have wantonly defaced one of the noblest, specimens of the workmanship of God.  Nor shall it be your excuse that, murderer as you are, you have spoken daggers, but used none.

The circumstances of the closing scene of poor Keats’s life were 60 not made known to me until the Elegy was ready for the press.  I am given to understand that the wound which his sensitive spirit had received from the criticism of Endymion was exasperated by the bitter sense of unrequited benefits; the poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom 65 he had wasted the promise of his genius than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care.  He was accompanied to Rome, and attended in his last illness, by Mr. Severn, a young artist of the highest promise, who, I have been informed, ’almost risked his own life, and sacrificed every prospect to unwearied attendance upon his dying friend.’  Had I known these circumstances before the completion 70 of my poem, I should have been tempted to add my feeble tribute of applause to the more solid recompense which the virtuous man finds in the recollection of his own motives.  Mr. Severn can dispense with a reward from ’such stuff as dreams are made of.’  His conduct is a golden augury of the success of his future career. 75 May the unextinguished spirit of his illustrious friend animate the creations of his pencil, and plead against oblivion for his name!

ADONAIS.

1.

  I weep for Adonais—­he is dead! 
    Oh weep for Adonais, though our tears
  Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! 
    And thou, sad Hour selected from all years
    To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, 5
  And teach them thine own sorrow!  Say:  ’With me
    Died Adonais!  Till the future dares
  Forget the past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity.’