Late in 1818, after he had published his first volume of verse, he met Fanny Brawne, a girl of eighteen, and soon fell desperately in love with her. The next six months were the happiest and the most productive period of his life. His health was then such that he could take long walks with her. In the first spring after he had met her, he wrote in less than three hours his wonderful _Ode to a Nightingale_, while he was sitting in the garden of his home at Wentworth Place, Hampstead, near London, listening to the song of the bird. Most of his famous poems were written in the year after meeting her. In February, 1820, his health began to decline so rapidly that he knew that his days were numbered. His mother and one of his brothers had died of consumption, and he had been for some time threatened with the disease. He offered to release Miss Brawne from her engagement, but she would not listen to the suggestion. She and her mother tried to nurse him back to health. Few events in the history of English authors are tinged with a deeper pathos than his engagement to Miss Brawne. Some of the letters that he wrote to her or about her are almost tragic. After he had taken his last leave of her he wrote, "I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her." [Illustration: WENTWORTH PLACE, KEATS'S HOME IN HAMPSTEAD.] Acting on insistent medical advice, Keats sailed for Italy in September, 1820, accompanied by a stanch friend, the artist Joseph Severn. On this voyage, Keats wrote a sonnet which proved to be his swan song:-- "Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art-- Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores." While he lay on his sick bed in Rome, he said: "I feel the flowers growing over me." In February, 1821, he died, at the age of twenty-five years and four months. On the modest stone which marks his grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, there was placed at his request: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." His most appropriate epitaph is Shelley's _Adonais_. [Illustration: GRAVE OF KEATS, ROME.] Poems.--In 1817 he published his first poems in a thin volume, which did not attract much attention, although it contained two excellent sonnets: _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_ and _On the Grasshopper and Cricket_, which begins with the famous line:-- "The poetry of earth is never dead." We may also find in this volume such lines of promise as:-- "Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown The reading of an ever changing tale."