LIFE.  Keats’s life of devotion to beauty and to poetry is all the more remarkable in view of his lowly origin.  He was the son of a hostler and stable keeper, and was born in the stable of the Swan and Hoop Inn, London, in 1795.  One has only to read the rough stable scenes from our first novelists, or even from Dickens, to understand how little there was in such an atmosphere to develop poetic gifts.  Before Keats was fifteen years old both parents died, and he was placed with his brothers and sisters in charge of guardians.  Their first act seems to have been to take Keats from school at Enfield, and to bind him as an apprentice to a surgeon at Edmonton.  For five years he served his apprenticeship, and for two years more he was surgeon’s helper in the hospitals; but though skillful enough to win approval, he disliked his work, and his thoughts were on other things.  “The other day, during a lecture,” he said to a friend, “there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland.”  A copy of Spenser’s Faery Queen, which had been given him by Charles Cowden Clark, was the prime cause of his abstraction.  He abandoned his profession in 1817, and early in the same year published his first volume of Poems.  It was modest enough in spirit, as was also his second volume, Endymion (1818); but that did not prevent brutal attacks upon the author and his work by the self-constituted critics of Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly.  It is often alleged that the poet’s spirit and ambition were broken by these attacks;[229] but Keats was a man of strong character, and instead of quarreling with his reviewers, or being crushed by their criticism, he went quietly to work with the idea of producing poetry that should live forever.  As Matthew Arnold says, Keats “had flint and iron in him”; and in his next volume he accomplished his own purpose and silenced unfriendly criticism.

For the three years during which Keats wrote his poetry he lived chiefly in London and in Hampstead, but wandered at times over England and Scotland, living for brief spaces in the Isle of Wight, in Devonshire, and in the Lake district, seeking to recover his own health, and especially to restore that of his brother.  His illness began with a severe cold, but soon developed into consumption; and added to this sorrow was another,—­his love for Fannie Brawne, to whom he was engaged, but whom he could not marry on account of his poverty and growing illness.  When we remember all this personal grief and the harsh criticism of literary men, the last small volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), is most significant, as showing not only Keats’s wonderful poetic gifts, but also his beautiful and indomitable spirit.  Shelley, struck by the beauty and promise of “Hyperion,” sent a generous invitation to the author to come to Pisa and live with him; but