Keats never quite recovered his good health, and other griefs and troubles crowded in upon him.  It was after his return from this tour that his dearly loved brother, Tom, died.  Cruel criticisms of his poetry hurt him at the same time, and he was in trouble about money, for the family guardian had not proved a good manager.  And now to this already overcharged heart something else was added.  Keats fell in love.  The lady he loved was young and beautiful, but commonplace.  Keats himself describes her when he first met her as “beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable, and strange.”  Her beauty and strangeness won for her a way to the poet’s heart.  Love, however, brought to him no joyful rest, but rather passionate, jealous restlessness.  Yet in spite of all his troubles, Keats continued to write poems which will ever be remembered as among the most beautiful in our language.

Like Scott and Byron, Keats wrote metrical romances.  One of these, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, is founded upon a tale of Boccaccio, that old master to whom so many poets have gone for inspiration.  In Keats’s romances there is no war-cry, no clash of swords as in Scott’s, and the luxury is altogether different from Byron’s.  There is in them that trembling sense of beauty which opens to us wide windows into fairyland.  They are simple stories veiled in the glamour of lovely words, and full of the rich color and the magic of the middle ages.  But here as elsewhere in Keats’s poetry what we lack is the touch of human sorrow.  Keats wrote of nature with all Wordsworth’s insight and truth, and with greater magic of words.  He understood the mystery of nature, but of the mystery of the heart of man it was not his to sing.  He lived in a world apart.  The terror and beauty of real life hardly touched him.  Alone of all the poets of his day he was unmoved by the French Revolution, and all that it stood for.

Some day you will read Keats’s metrical romances, and now I will give you a few verses from some of his odes, for in his odes we have Keats’s poetry at its very best.  Here are some verses from his ode On a Grecian Urn.  You have seen such a vase, perhaps, with beautiful sculptured figures on it, dancing maidens and piping shepherds.

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:  Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal—­yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

“Ah, happy, happy bought! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love!  For ever warm and