While he lay on his sick bed in Rome, he said:  “I feel the flowers growing over me.”  In February, 1821, he died, at the age of twenty-five years and four months.  On the modest stone which marks his grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, there was placed at his request:  “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”  His most appropriate epitaph is Shelley’s Adonais.

[Illustration:  GRAVE OF KEATS, ROME.]

Poems.—­In 1817 he published his first poems in a thin volume, which did not attract much attention, although it contained two excellent sonnets:  On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer and On the Grasshopper and Cricket, which begins with the famous line:—­

  “The poetry of earth is never dead.”

We may also find in this volume such lines of promise as:—­

  “Life is the rose’s hope while yet unblown
  The reading of an ever changing tale.”

A year later, his long poem, Endymion, appeared.  The inner purpose of this poetic romance is to show the search of the soul for absolute Beauty.  The first five lines are a beautiful exposition of his poetic creed. Endymion, however, suffers from immaturity, shown in boyish sentimentality, in a confusion of details, and in an overabundance of ornament.  This poem met with a torrent of abuse.  One critic even questioned whether Keats was the real name of the author, adding, “we almost doubt whether any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody.”  Keats showed himself a better critic than the reviewers.  It is unusual for a poet to recognize almost at once the blemishes in his own work.  He acknowledged that a certain critic—­

“...is perfectly right in regard to the ‘slipshod’ Endymion... it is as good as I had the power to make it by myself.  I have written independently, without judgement, I may write independently and with judgement hereafter.”

[Illustration:  FACSIMILE OF ORIGINAL MS. OF ENDYMION.]

The quickness of his development is one of the most amazing facts in literary history.  He was twenty-three when Endymion was published, but in the next eighteen months he had almost finished his life’s work.  In that brief time, he perfected his art and wrote poems that rank among the greatest of their kind, and that have influenced the work of many succeeding poets, such as Tennyson, Lowell, and Swinburne.

[Illustration:  ENDYMION. From mural painting by H.O.  Walker, Congressional Library, Washington, D.C.]

Nearly all his greatest poems were written in 1819 and published in his 1820 volume. The Eve of St. Agnes (January, 1819) and the Ode to a Nightingale (May, 1819) are perhaps his two most popular poems; but his other masterpieces are sufficiently great to make choice among them largely a matter of individual preference.