DAYS WITH THE GREAT POETS KEATS [Illustration] [_Painting by W. J. Neatby._ LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI. I met a lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery's child; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild.] A DAY WITH KEATS BY MAY BYRON HODDER & STOUGHTON LTD., PUBLISHERS LONDON _Uniform with this Volume_ DAYS WITH THE POETS BROWNING BURNS KEATS LONGFELLOW SHAKESPEARE TENNYSON DAYS WITH THE COMPOSERS BEETHOVEN CHOPIN GOUNOD MENDELSSOHN TSCHAIKOVSKY WAGNER _Made and Printed in Great Britain for Hodder & Stoughton, Limited, by C. Tinling & Co., Ltd., Liverpool, London and Prescot._ A DAY WITH KEATS About eight o'clock one morning in early summer, a young man may be seen sauntering to and fro in the garden of Wentworth Place, Hampstead. Wentworth Place consists of two houses only; in the first, John Keats is established along with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. The second is inhabited by a Mrs. Brawne and her family. They are wooden houses, with festooning draperies of foliage: and the clean countrified air of Hampstead comes with sweet freshness through the gardens, and fills the young man with ecstatic delight. He gazes around him, with his weak dark eyes, upon the sky, the flowers, the various minutiæ of nature which mean so much to him: and although he has severely tried a never robust physique by sitting up half the night in study, a new exhilaration now throbs through his veins. For, in his own words, he loves the principle of beauty in all things: and he repeats to himself, as he loiters up and down in the sunshine, the lines into which he has crystallized, for all time, sensations similar to those of the present:--