TO JOSEPH SEVERN, ROME. The happy circumstance that the fifty-seventh year since you watched at the death-bed of Keats finds you still among us, makes it impossible to inscribe any other name than yours in front of these letters, intimately connected as they are with the decline of the poet's life, concerning the latter part of which you alone have full knowledge. It cannot be but that some of the letters will give you pain, and notably the three written when the poet's face was already turned towards that land whither you accompanied him, whence he knew there was no return for him, and where you still live near the hallowed place of his burial. All who love Keats's memory must share such pain in the contemplation of his agony of soul. But you who love him having known, and we who love him unknown except by faith in what is written, must alike rejoice in the good hap that has preserved, for our better knowledge of his heart, these vivid and varied transcripts of his inner life during his latter years,-must alike be content to take the knowledge with such alloy of pain as the hapless turn of events rendered inevitable. On a memorable occasion it was said of you by a great poet and prophet that, had he known of the circumstances of your unwearied attendance at the death-bed, he should have been tempted to add his "tribute of applause to the more solid recompense which the virtuous man finds in the recollection of his own motives;" and he uttered the wish that the "unextinguished Spirit" of Keats might “plead against Oblivion" for your name. Were any such plea needed, the Spirit to prefer it, then unextinguished, is now known for inextinguishable; and whithersoever the name of" our Adonais" travels, there will yours also be found. This opportunity may not unfitly serve to record my gratitude for your ready kindness in affording me information on various points concerning your friend's life and death, and also for the permission to engrave your solemn portraiture of the beautiful countenance seen, as you only of all men living saw it, in its final agony. H. B. F. |