had an angry word to say of him, and they loved him not only for his terrier-like courage, but for his generosity, his high-mindedness, and his utter ignorance of what was mean or base.”  But although John was so much loved, and although he was generally so bright and merry, he had miserable times too.  He had fits of melancholy, but when these came he would go to his brothers and pour out all his grief to them.  This made him feel better, and he troubled no one else with his moods.

E.  Holmes.

Very soon after John went to school his father was killed by a fall from his horse, his grandfather died too, and his mother married again.  But the marriage was not happy and she soon left her new husband and went to live with her own mother at Edmonton.  So for five years John’s life was spent between school and his grandmother’s house.  They were a happy family.  The brothers loved each other though they jangled and fought, and they loved their mother and little sister too.

So the years went on, and John showed not the lightest sign of being a poet.  Some doggerel rimes he wrote to his sister show the boy he was, not very unlike other boys.

“There was a naughty boy,
And a naughty boy was he: 
He kept little fishes
In washing-tubs three,
In spite
Of the might
Of the maid,
Nor afraid
Of his granny good. 
He often would
Hurly-burly
Get up early
And go
By hook or crook
To the brook,
And bring home
Miller’s Thumb,
Tittlebat
Not over fat,
Minnows small
As the stall
Of a glove,
Not above
The size
Of a nice
Little baby’s
Little fingers.”

After John had been at school some time he suddenly began to care for books.  He began to read and read greedily, he won all the literature prizes, and even on half-holidays he could hardly be driven out to join in the games of his comrades, preferring rather to sit in the quiet schoolroom translating from Latin or French, and even when he was driven forth he went book in hand.

It was while John was still at school that his mother died and all her children were placed under the care of a guardian.  As John was now fifteen, their guardian took him from school, and it was decided to make him a doctor.  He was apprenticed, in the fashion of the day, to a surgeon at Edmonton, for five years.  Keats seems to have been quite pleased with this arrangement.  His new studies still left him time to read.  He was within walking distance of his old school, and many a summer afternoon he spent reading in the garden with Cowden Clarke, the son of his old schoolmaster, in whom Keats had found a friend.  From this friend he borrowed Spenser’s Faery Queen, and having read it a new wonder-world seemed opened to him.  “He ramped through the scenes of the romance like a young horse turned into a spring meadow,"* and all through Keats’s poetry we find the love of beautiful coloring and of gorgeous detail that we also find in Spenser.  It was Spenser that awakened in Keats his sleeping gift of song, and the first verses which he wrote were in imitation of the Elizabethan poet.