Keats refused, having little sympathy with Shelley’s revolt against society.  The invitation had this effect, however, that it turned Keats’s thoughts to Italy, whither he soon went in the effort to save his life.  He settled in Rome with his friend Severn, the artist, but died soon after his arrival, in February, 1821.  His grave, in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, is still an object of pilgrimage to thousands of tourists; for among all our poets there is hardly another whose heroic life and tragic death have so appealed to the hearts of poets and young enthusiasts.

THE WORK OF KEATS.  “None but the master shall praise us; and none but the master shall blame” might well be written on the fly leaf of every volume of Keats’s poetry; for never was there a poet more devoted to his ideal, entirely independent of success or failure.  In strong contrast with his contemporary, Byron, who professed to despise the art that made him famous, Keats lived for poetry alone, and, as Lowell pointed out, a virtue went out of him into everything he wrote.  In all his work we have the impression of this intense loyalty to his art; we have the impression also of a profound dissatisfaction that the deed falls so far short of the splendid dream.  Thus after reading Chapman’s translation of Homer he writes: 

    Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
    And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
    Round many western islands have I been
    Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 
    Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
    That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
    Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
    Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: 
    Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
    Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific—­and all his men
    Looked at each other with a wild surmise—­
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

In this striking sonnet we have a suggestion of Keats’s high ideal, and of his sadness because of his own ignorance, when he published his first little volume of poems in 1817.  He knew no Greek; yet Greek literature absorbed and fascinated him, as he saw its broken and imperfect reflection in an English translation.  Like Shakespeare, who also was but poorly educated in the schools, he had a marvelous faculty of discerning the real spirit of the classics,—­a faculty denied to many great scholars, and to most of the “classic” writers of the preceding century,—­and so he set himself to the task of reflecting in modern English the spirit of the old Greeks.

The imperfect results of this attempt are seen in his next volume, Endymion, which is the story of a young shepherd beloved by a moon goddess.  The poem begins with the striking lines: 

    A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
    Its loveliness increases; it will never
    Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
    A bower quiet for us; and a sleep
    Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing,