File:Where ghosts walk - the haunts of familiar characters in history and literature (1898) (14596409609).jpg

Identifier: whereghostswalkh00harl (find matches)
Title: Where ghosts walk : the haunts of familiar characters in history and literature
Year: 1898 (1890s)
Authors: Harland, Marion, 1830-1922
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Publisher: New York : G. P. Putnam
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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nd for so lo7ig! I70 Where Ghosts Walk The simple phrase holds a volume ofmeaning, a depth and completeness of un-selfish sympathy, such as is given to fewmen to inspire, or to feel. The sovereign commonwealth of read-ers and the oligarchy of reviewers have,since then, done full credit to the geniusof John Keats. From the day he left hiscradle to that in which Joseph Severn laidto rest in a foreign land the shatteredframe from which the lungs had wastedentirely away, two months earlier, he hadnever a sane mind in a sane body. Hisbiographers throw away time in disputingwhether or not Byron wrote the truth indeclaring that the poets life was snuffedout by an article. His brothers summingup of the lamentable case covered moreand tenable ground : Blackwood and The Quarterly, asso-ciated with our family disease, consump-tion, were ministers of death sufficientlyvenomous, cruel, and deadly to have con-signed one of less sensibility to a prema-ture grave. The seeds of death were implanted in
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John Keats in Rome 17^ his constitution by his mother. From herhe drew, also, his sensuous temperament,his intolerance of pain and the capacityfor loving and suffering with fierce unrea-son that hurried on the inevitable end.* The horrid morbidity he deplores in arational hour, finally ate into and con-sumed his heart. How much of this wasdue to ill-health, how much to venom-ous critics, and how little to natural lackof balance and to undisciplined passion, isa nice question which, it seems to us, isbest settled by his latest biographer, Wil-liam Michael Rossetti. His Life of Keatsis our pocket companion in the silent up-per chamber where torture ceased, andrest began. Fanny Brawne was a poor creature uponwhich to stake love and life, and Keatsknew this to be true in the lucid intervalsof his infatuation. Rossetti gives the keyto the wretched entanglement in two judi-cial lines : He was in a state of feeling propenseto love. Some woman was required to fillthe void in his heart, 172 Wh

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