Haydon. *Bailey.

In a letter which reached Rome too late was this message for Keats, “Tell that great poet and noble-hearted man that we shall all bear his memory in the most precious parts of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads to it, as our loves do.”

We bow our heads to his memory and say farewell to him in these words of his own fairy song—­

“Shed no tea! oh shed no tear! 
The flower will bloom another year. 
Weep no more! oh weep no more! 
Young buds sleep in the roots’ white core. 
Dry your eyes! oh dry your eyes! 
For I was taught in Paradise
To ease my heart of melodies—­

                Shed no tear.

“Overhear! look overhead! 
’Mong the blossoms white and red—­
Look up, look up.  I flutter now
On this flush pomegranate bough. 
See me! ’tis this silvery bill
Ever cures the good man’s ill. 
Shed not tear! oh shed not tear! 
The flower will bloom another year. 
Adieu!  Adieu!—­I fly, adieu! 
I vanish in the heaven’s blue—­

                Adieu!  Adieu!”

Chapter LXXXII CARLYLE—­THE SAGE OF CHELSEA

JOHN KEATS was little more than a month old, when far away across the Border another little baby boy was born.  His parent, too were simple folk, and he, too, was born to be great.

This boy’s name was Thomas Carlyle.  His father was a stone-mason and had built with his own hands the house in which his son Thomas was born.  The little village of Ecclefechan was about six miles from the Solway Firth, among the pasture lands of the bale of Annan.  Here Thomas grew to be a boy running about barefooted and sturdy with his many brothers and sisters, and one step-brother older than himself.

But he did not run about quite wild, for by the time he was five his mother had taught him to read and his father had taught him to do sums, and then he was sent to the village school.

James Carlyle was a good and steady workman.  Long afterwards his famous son said of him, “Nothing that he undertook to do but he did it faithfully and like a true man.  I shall look on the houses he built with a certain proud interest.  They stand firm and sound to the heart all over his little district.  No one that comes after him will ever say, ’Here was the finger of a hollow eye-servant.’  They are little texts to me of the gospel of man’s free will.”  But there were meanwhile many little folks to clothe, many hungry little mouths to fill, so their clothes were of the plainest, and porridge and milk, and potatoes forming their only fare.  “It was not a joyful life,” says Thomas—­“what life is?—­yet a safe, quiet one; above most others, or any others I have witnessed, a wholesome one.”

Between the earnest and frugal father and mother and their children there was a great and reverent though quiet love, and poor though they were, the parents determined that their children should be well taught, so when Thomas was ten he was sent to a school at Annan some five miles away, where he could learn more than in the little village school.