Page:The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats, 1899.djvu/25



was born in Finsbury, London, on either the 29th or the 31st of October, 1795. He died in an apartment overlooking the Piazza di Spagna, Rome, February 23, 1821. Thus his life was a brief span of a few months more than twenty-five years, and as his first acknowledged verses were written in the autumn of 1813, and his last sonnet was composed in the autumn of 1820, his poetical career was seven years long. Within that time he composed the verses included in this volume, yet by far the largest portion may be referred to the three years 1818-1820, and if one distilled the whole, the precious deposit would be but a few hundred lines. For all that, perhaps because of it, and because Keats with his warm human passion wrote what is almost an autobiography in his letters, we are able to get a tolerably clear notion of his early training and associations, and to follow quite closely the development of his nature after he began to devote himself to poetry.

His father, Thomas Keats, was not a Londoner by birth, but came from the country to the town early, and was head hostler in a livery stable before he was twenty. He married Frances Jennings, the daughter of his master, who thereupon retired from business, leaving it in the hands of his son-in-law. The young couple lived over the stable at first, but when their family increased, they removed to a house in the neighborhood. John Keats was the first born. He had two brothers and a sister who grew to maturity. George Keats was sixteen months his junior; Thomas was four years younger, and Fanny, who was born in 1803, was a girl of ten when John Keats was making his first serious ventures in poetry.

The little that is known of Keats's parents is yet sufficient to show them persons of generous qualities and lively temperament. They were prosperous in their lives, and meant to better the condition of their children, so they sent the boys to good schools. The father died when John Keats was in his tenth year, and his mother shortly after married a man who appears to have been her husband's successor in business as well as in affections, but the marriage proved an unhappy one; there was a separation, and the stepfather scarcely came into the boy's life to affect him for good or for ill. He was still a school-boy, not yet fifteen, when his mother died, and he grieved for her with the force of a passionate nature that through a short life was to find various modes of expressing its keen sensibility.

As Keats went early to school, the influences which came most forcibly into his boyhood were from his brothers and schoolmates. Tom, the youngest brother, was always frail. George, who was nearer John's age, was like him in spirit and more robust. His recollections of his brothers, written after both Tom and John had died, are frank enough to make the relation undoubtedly truthful:—