author were brutally attacked in 'The Quarterly Review' and 'Blackwood's
Magazine.' The sickness and death, from consumption, of one of Keats'
dearly-loved brothers was followed by his infatuation with a certain Fanny
Brawne, a commonplace girl seven years younger than himself. This
infatuation thenceforth divided his life with poetry and helped to create
in him a restless impatience that led him, among other things, to an
unhappy effort to force his genius, in the hope of gain, into the very
unsuitable channel of play-writing. But restlessness did not weaken his
genuine and maturing poetic power; his third and last volume, published in
1820, and including 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' 'Isabella,' 'Lamia,' the
fragmentary 'Hyperion,' and his half dozen great odes, probably contains
more poetry of the highest order than any other book of original verse, of
so small a size, ever sent from the press. By this time, however, Keats
himself was stricken with consumption, and in the effort to save his life a
warmer climate was the last resource. Lack of sympathy with Shelley and his
poetry led him to reject Shelley's generous offer of entertainment at Pisa,
and he sailed with his devoted friend the painter Joseph Severn to southern
Italy. A few months later, in 1821, he died at Rome, at the age of
twenty-five. His tombstone, in a neglected corner of the Protestant
cemetery just outside the city wall, bears among other words those which in
bitterness of spirit he himself had dictated: 'Here lies one whose name was
writ in water.' But, in fact, not only had he created more great poetry
than was ever achieved by any other man at so early an age, but probably no
other influence was to prove so great as his on the poets of the next
generation.

The most important qualities of his poetry stand out clearly:

1. He is, as we have implied, the great apostle of full though not
unhealthy enjoyment of external Beauty, the beauty of the senses. He once