"I am indicating at as dull a rate as a battered finger-post in wet weather. Not that I am ill: for I am very well altogether. Your affectionate Friend, Leigh Hunt."[147] This was probably the last letter written by him to Keats. In September Keats went to Rome with Severn to escape the hardships of the winter climate, after having declined an invitation from Shelley to visit him at Pisa. In the same month, Hunt published an affectionate farewell to him in _The Indicator_. An announcement of his death appeared in _The Examiner_ of March 25, 1821. The story of the personal relations of the two men could not be better closed than with the words of Hunt written March 8, 1821, to Severn in Rome when he believed Keats still alive: "If he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it already, and can put it into better language than any man. I hear that he does not like to be told that he may get better; nor is it to be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not survive. He can only regard it as a puerile thing, and an insinuation that he shall die. But if his persuasion should happen to be no longer so strong, or if he can now put up with attempts to console him, tell him of what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour) think always, that I have seen too many instances of recovery from apparently desperate cases of consumption not to be in hope to the very last. If he still cannot bear to hear this, tell him--tell that great poet and noblehearted man--that we shall all bear his memory in the most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads to it, as our loves do. Or if this, again, will trouble his spirit, tell him that we shall never cease to remember and love him; and that, Christian or infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think all who are of one accord in mind and heart are journeying to one and the same place, and shall unite somewhere or other again, face to face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted."[148] The literary relations of Keats and Hunt will be considered under two heads; first, the criticism of Keats's writings by Hunt; and second, his direct influence upon them. _On first looking into Chapman's Homer_ in _The Examiner_ of December 1st, 1816, was embodied in an article entitled "Young Poets." It was the first notice of Keats to appear in print and is in part as follows: "The last of these young aspirants whom we have met with, and who promise to help the new school to revive Nature and 'To put a spirit of youth in everything,'--