THE TOMB OF KEATS 1
KEATS'S SONNET ON BLUE 4
DINNERS AND DISHES 8
SHAKESPEARE ON SCENERY 10
'HENRY THE FOURTH' AT OXFORD 15
A HANDBOOK TO MARRIAGE 18
TO READ OR NOT TO READ 21
THE LETTERS OF A GREAT WOMAN 22
BERANGER IN ENGLAND 27
THE POETRY OF THE PEOPLE 29
'THE CENCI' 32
BALZAC IN ENGLISH 34
BEN JONSON 37
MR. SYMONDS' HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE 39
MR. MORRIS'S 'ODYSSEY' 44
RUSSIAN NOVELISTS 48
MR. PATER'S 'IMAGINARY PORTRAITS' 51
A GERMAN PRINCESS 55
'A VILLAGE TRAGEDY' 63
MR. MORRIS'S COMPLETION OF THE 'ODYSSEY' 65
MRS. SOMERVILLE 70
ARISTOTLE AT AFTERNOON TEA 76
EARLY CHRISTIAN ART IN IRELAND 81
MADAME RISTORI 85
ENGLISH POETESSES 91
VENUS OR VICTORY 101
M. CARO ON GEORGE SAND 105
A FASCINATING BOOK 108
HENLEY'S POEMS 123
SOME LITERARY LADIES 129
POETRY AND PRISON 143
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WALT WHITMAN 146
IRISH FAIRY TALES 152
MR. W. B. YEATS 158
MR. YEATS'S 'WANDERINGS OF OISIN' 160
MR. WILLIAM MORRIS'S LAST BOOK 162
SOME LITERARY NOTES 167
MR. SWINBURNE'S 'POEMS AND BALLADS' (Third Series) 173
A CHINESE SAGE 177
MR. PATER'S 'APPRECIATIONS' 187
SENTENTIAE 194
THE TOMB OF KEATS
(_Irish Monthly_, July 1877.)
As one enters Rome from the Via Ostiensis by the Porta San Paolo, the
first object that meets the eye is a marble pyramid which stands close at
hand on the left.
There are many Egyptian obelisks in Rome--tall, snakelike spires of red
sandstone, mottled with strange writings, which remind us of the pillars
of flame which led the children of Israel through the desert away from
the land of the Pharaohs; but more wonderful than these to look upon is
this gaunt, wedge-shaped pyramid standing here in this Italian city,
unshattered amid the ruins and wrecks of time, looking older than the
Eternal City itself, like terrible impassiveness turned to stone. And so
in the Middle Ages men supposed this to be the sepulchre of Remus, who
was slain by his own brother at the founding of the city, so ancient and
mysterious it appears; but we have now, perhaps unfortunately, more
accurate information about it, and know that it is the tomb of one Caius
Cestius, a Roman gentleman of small note, who died about 30 B.C.
Yet though we cannot care much for the dead man who lies in lonely state
beneath it, and who is only known to the world through his sepulchre,
still this pyramid will be ever dear to the eyes of all English-speaking
people, because at evening its shadows fall on the tomb of one who walks
with Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Byron, and Shelley, and Elizabeth
Barrett Browning in the great procession of the sweet singers of England.
For at its foot there is a green sunny slope, known as the Old Protestant
Cemetery, and on this a common-looking grave, which bears the following
inscription:
This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who
on his deathbed, in the bitterness of his heart, desired these words
to be engraven on his tombstone: HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN
WATER. February 24, 1821.
And the name of the young English poet is John Keats.
Lord Houghton calls this cemetery 'one of the most beautiful spots on
which the eye and heart of man can rest,' and Shelley speaks of it as
making one 'in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so
sweet a place'; and indeed when I saw the violets and the daisies and the
poppies that overgrow the tomb, I remembered how the dead poet had once
told his friend that he thought the 'intensest pleasure he had received
in life was in watching the growth of flowers,' and how another time,
after lying a while quite still, he murmured in some strange prescience
of early death, 'I feel the flowers growing over me.'
But this time-worn stone and these wildflowers are but poor memorials {2}
of one so great as Keats; most of all, too, in this city of Rome, which
pays such honour to her dead; where popes, and emperors, and saints, and
cardinals lie hidden in 'porphyry wombs,' or couched in baths of jasper
and chalcedony and malachite, ablaze with precious stones and metals, and
tended with continual service. For very noble is the site, and worthy of
a noble monument; behind looms the grey pyramid, symbol of the world's
age, and filled with memories of the sphinx, and the lotus leaf, and the
glories of old Nile; in front is the Monte Testaccio, built, it is said,
with the broken fragments of the vessels in which all the nations of the
East and the West brought their tribute to Rome; and a little distance
off, along the slope of the hill under the Aurelian wall, some tall gaunt
cypresses rise, like burnt-out funeral torches, to mark the spot where
Shelley's heart (that 'heart of hearts'!) lies in the earth; and, above
all, the soil on which we tread is very Rome!
As I stood beside the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as
of a Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of Guido's
St. Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown
boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by his evil enemies
to a tree, and though pierced by arrows, raising his eyes with divine,
impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening heavens. And
thus my thoughts shaped themselves to rhyme: