By the death of John Keats (1796-1821), whose elegy Shelley sang in _Adonais_, English poetry suffered an irreparable loss. His _Endymion_, 1818, though disfigured by mawkishness and by some affectations of manner, was rich in promise. Its faults were those of youth, the faults of exuberance and of a sensibility, which time corrects. _Hyperion_, 1820, promised to be his masterpiece, but he left it unfinished--"a Titanic torso"--because, as he said, "there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." The subject was the displacement by Phoebus Apollo of the ancient sun-god, Hyperion, the last of the Titans who retained his dominion. It was a theme of great capabilities, and the poem was begun by Keats with a strength of conception which leads to the belief that here was once more a really epic genius, had fate suffered it to mature. The fragment, as it stands--"that inlet to severe magnificence"--proves how rapidly Keats's diction was clarifying. He had learned to string up his loose chords. There is nothing maudlin in _Hyperion_; all there is in whole tones and in the grand manner, "as sublime as Aeschylus," said Byron, with the grave, antique simplicity, and something of modern sweetness interfused. Keats's father was a groom in a London livery-stable. The poet was apprenticed at fifteen to a surgeon. At school he had studied Latin but not Greek. He, who of all the English poets had the most purely Hellenic spirit, made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the medium of classical dictionaries, translations, and popular mythologies; and later through the marbles and casts in the British Museum. His friend, the artist Haydon, lent him a copy of Chapman's Homer, and the impression that it made upon him he recorded in his sonnet, _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_. Other poems of the same inspiration are his three sonnets, _To Homer_, _On Seeing the Elgin Marbles_, _On a Picture of Leander_, _Lamia_, and the beautiful _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. But Keats's art was retrospective and eclectic, the blossom of a double root; and "golden-tongued Romance with serene lute" had her part in him, as well as the classics. In his seventeenth year he had read the _Faerie Queene_, and from Spenser he went on to a study of Chaucer, Shakspere and Milton. Then he took up Italian and read Ariosto. The influence of these studies is seen in his poem, _Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, taken from a story of Boccaccio; in his wild ballad, _La Belle Dame sans Merci_; and in his love tale, the _Eve of St. Agnes_, with its wealth of mediaeval adornment. In the _Ode to Autumn_, and _Ode to a Nightingale_, the Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the warmer hues of romance. There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats's life. The seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent genius, but he knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must die