Perhaps these are but fruitless reveries! but it is hard to resist them.  The only course is to hold fast to one’s faith in what is pure and beautiful, and to give thanks that such spirits as the spirit of Keats are allowed to pass in flame across the dark heaven, calling from horizon to horizon among the interstellar spaces; and to be sure that the glow, the ardour, the aspirations that they impart to the soul are real and true—­an essential part of the mind of God, however small a part they may be of that Eternal and all-embracing Will.

L

I saw this morning in the paper, half with amusement and half with shame, a letter signed by a long list of the sort of people whom a schoolboy would designate as “buffers,” inviting the public to come forward and subscribe for the purchase of the house where Keats died at Rome, in order to make it a sort of Museum, sacred to him and Shelley.  I was amused, because of the strange ineptitude and clumsiness of the proposal.  In the first place, to make a shrine of pilgrimage for two of our great English poets in Rome, of all places—­that is fantastic enough; but to select the house which Keats entered a dying man, and where he spent about four months in horrible torture of both mind and body, from which he wrote to his friend Brown, “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence,”—­could anything be more inappropriate?  It is not too much, in fact, to say that the house selected to enshrine his memory is the house where he was less himself than at any other period of his short life.  If the house in Wentworth Place, Hampstead, which I believe has been lately identified with absolute certainty, could have been purchased,—­the house where, on the verge of disaster and doom, Keats spent a brief ecstatic interval of life,—­there would have been some meaning in that; but one might almost as well purchase the inn at Dumfries where Keats once spent a few nights as the house at Rome; in fact, if the Dumfries inn had been purchased, it might have been made a Keats-Burns museum, if the idea was to kill two birds with one stone—­for to associate Shelley with Keats in the house at Rome is another piece of well-meaning stupidity.  Their acquaintance was really of the slightest, though Shelley was extraordinarily kind and generous to Keats, offering to receive him into his own house as an invalid, and of course regarding him with the deepest admiration, as the Adonais testifies.  But Keats never took very much to Shelley, and was always a little suspicious that he was being patronised; and consequently he never opened his heart and mind to Shelley as he did to some of his friends.  Indeed, Shelley knew very little of Keats, and supposed him to be a very different character to what he really was.  Shelley supposed that Keats had had both his happiness and his health undermined by severe