The judicious verdict at last pronounced upon him may be thus epitomized:
he was a poet with fine fancy, original ideas, felicity of expression, but
full of faults due to his individuality and his youth; and his life was
not spared to correct these. In 1820 a hemorrhage of brilliant arterial
blood heralded the end. He himself said, "Bring me a candle; let me see
this blood;" and when it was brought, added, "I cannot be deceived in that
color; that drop is my death-warrant: I must die." By advice he went to
Italy, where he grew rapidly worse, and died on the 23d of February, 1821,
having left this for his epitaph: "Here lies one whose name was writ in
water." Thus dying at the age of twenty-four, he must be judged less for
what he was, than as an earnest of what he would have been. _The Eve of
St. Agnes_ is one of the most exquisite poems in any language, and is as
essentially allied to the simplicity and nature of the modern school of
poetry as his _Endymion_ is to the older school. Keats took part in what a
certain writer has called "the reaction against the barrel-organ style,
which had been reigning by a kind of sleepy, divine right for half a
century.
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