To that end he gave the best that he had to give, freely, generously, joyously pouring himself into the ministry of his art. He did not dream for a moment that the gift was perfect. Flattery could not blind him to the limitations and defects of his early work. He was his own best and clearest critic. But he knew that so far as it went his poetic inspiration was true. He had faithfully followed the light of a pure and elevating joy in the opulent, manifold beauty of nature and in the eloquent significance of old-world legends, and he believed that it had already led him to a place among the poets whose verse would bring delight, in far-off years, to the sons and daughters of mankind. He believed also that if he kept alive his faith in the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth it would lead him on yet further, into a nobler life and closer to those immortal bards whose “Souls still speak To mortals of their little week; Of their sorrows and delights; Of their passions and their spites; Of their glory and their shame; What doth strengthen and what maim.” He expressed this faith very clearly in the early and uneven poem called “Sleep and Poetry,” in a passage which begins “Oh, for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy! so I may do the deed That my own soul has to itself decreed.” And then, ere four years had followed that brave wish, his voice fell silent under a wasting agony of pain and love, and the daisies were growing upon his Roman grave. The pathos of his frustrated hope, his early death, has sometimes blinded men a little, it seems to me, to the real significance of his work and the true quality of his influence in poetry. He has been lamented in the golden verse of Shelley’s “Adonaïs,” and in the prose of a hundred writers who have shared Shelley’s error without partaking of his genius, as the loveliest innocent ever martyred by the cruelty of hostile critics. But, in fact, the vituperations of Gifford and his crew were no more responsible for the death of Keats, than the stings of insects are for the death of a man who has perished of hunger on the coast of Labrador. They added to his sufferings, no doubt, but they did not take away his life. Keats had far too much virtue in the old Roman sense—far too much courage, to be killed by a criticism. He died of consumption, as he clearly and sadly knew that he was fated to do when he first saw the drop of arterial blood upon his pillow.