“He was a chemist’s assistant,” said the Head, “and if some ninety or a years ago, you, Stone, or you, Blaize, had gone into a doctor’s little dispensary near Hampstead to get a dose because you had a pain in your inside, from eating too many strawberries, or from having shirked into Richmond and devoured more than a sufficiency of Maids of Honour you might have had your medicine given you by one of the greatest lyrical poets who ever lived. The doctor’s assistant, a pale young man with a bad cough, might perhaps have mixed it for you, and if you were wide awake you might have seen that when he got up to give you your pill or your powder, he laid down a pencil and a piece of paper on which he was scribbling. Stone, if you leave that wasp alone he will not get angry and sting you, or lose his head and think it was me who was annoying him. Yes, and then when you had paid your twopence and gone away with your pill, you may be sure he would have taken up his pencil and paper again. No doubt, if you had asked him, he would have copied out for you what he was writing on another piece of paper, in which he was accustomed to wrap up parcels, and wondered that you cared to pay another twopence for it. But if you sold that piece of paper to-day you would get, not twopence, but hundreds of pounds for it. For on it would be written lines by John Keats, in his own hand. And what you might have found on that piece of paper is this: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains A minute since, and Lethe wards have sunk. “Lethe we had in our Homer not long ago. Lethe, the water of forgetfulness. Sometimes I think Blaize and others of you have drunk it. “’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thy happiness That thou, light-wingèd dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Dreamest of summer in full-throated ease.” He read on, occasionally stopping to explain a word; once and again his voice trembled, as it did sometimes when he preached; once it nearly stopped altogether as he came to the lines: “Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn. “In tears amid the alien corn,” he repeated.