1821.]

DEATH OF KEATS.

267

and Mrs. Shelley do not disapprove of the step which I have taken, which is merely temporary.

I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats 1—is it actually true? I did not think criticism had been so killing. Though I differ from you essentially in your estimate of his performances, I so much abhor all unnecessary pain, that I would rather he had been seated on the highest peak of Parnassus than have perished in such a manner. Poor fellow! though with such inordinate self-love he would probably have not been very happy. I read the the review of Endymion in the Quarterly. It was severe, but surely not so severe as many reviews in that and other journals upon others.

I recollect the effect on me of the Edinburgh on my first poem; it was rage, and resistance, and redressbut not despondency nor despair. I grant that those are not amiable feelings; but, in this world of bustle and broil, and especially in the career of writing, a man should calculate upon his powers of resistance before he goes into the arena.

"Expect not life from pain nor danger free,

Nor deem the doom of man reversed for thee."2

You know my opinion of that second-hand school of

1. The Quarterly article on Endymion (1818), written by Croker, appeared in September, 1818. Two years and a half later, February 23, 1821, John Keats (1795-1821) died at Rome of consumption. His unfortunate passion for Fanny Brawne, pecuniary troubles, and, in his enfeebled health, the injustice of the criticism that he had received, accelerated the progress of a disease which first declared itself in February, 1820. "A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth "met me," says Coleridge, “in a lane near Highgate. It was "Keats. He was introduced to me, and staid a minute or so. "After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said, 'Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your "hand!' 'There is death in that hand,' I said, when Keats was "gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed "itself distinctly'" (Table Talk, vol. ii. pp. 89, 90).

2. Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, lines 155, 156.