One looks regretfully back to the breaking up of the little literary home in the Vale of Health—the roof under which Hunt tells us that he had introduced Shelley to the young poet Keats; that had welcomed the handsome, brown-faced Charles Lamb, and his always-to-be-pitied sister Mary; where the genial C. Cowden Clarke came and went as he listed, bursting in like a mingling of breeze and sunshine, full of freshness and warmth; and Keats, keenly sensitive and self-contained, who, loving his old schoolmaster’s son, to whom he owed deep obligations—the ‘first to teach him all the sweets of song’—yet thought the laughter-loving Clarke, in spite of his poetical taste, ‘coarse.’ One would fain have kept them a little longer dwellers in ‘sweet Hampstead.’ First Shelley sails away for Dante’s land, whither Hunt and Keats were eventually to follow him—the first to join Lord Byron in a literary enterprise that did not answer its noble projector’s expectations,’[192] and Keats in the companionship and care of his devoted friend, the young and promising artist Severn, with the vain hope of lengthening the thinning thread of life that bound him to earth. Throughout these years of failing health and mental trial Keats was suffering the sordid cares of insufficient means—cares that to an independent, upright spirit such as his, must have been an ever-present source of uneasiness and depression. The critics’ half-hearted verdict on ‘Endymion,’ when, as in the case of some of his reviewers, it was not cruel, must have deeply wounded the sensitive nature of the poet, who had yet the manliness to hide his wounds, and the faith in himself to fall back on the consolation of his own conviction of the vitality of his work. It stirs one with a feeling of indignation, remembering the depreciation of the poem in the poet’s lifetime, to read that at a sale of autographs in the September of the year 1897 the original manuscript of John Keats’ ‘Endymion’ sold for £695.