It Is Now In Form For Any And All Visitors, But The
Day I Went It Had Not Yet Been Put In Its Present Simple And Tasteful
Keeping.
A somewhat shrill and scraping-voiced matron inquired my
pleasure when she followed me into the ground-floor entrance from
somewhere without, and then, understanding, called hor young daughter,
who led me up to the room where Keats mused his last verse and breathed
his last sigh.
It is a very little room, looking down over the Spanish
Steps, with their dike of bloom, across the piazza to the narrow stretch
of the Via del Babuino. I must have stood in it with Severn and heard
him talk of Keats and his ultimate days and hours; for I remember some
such talk, but not the details of it. He was a very gentle old man and
fondly proud of his goodness to the poor dying poet, as he well might
be, and I was glad to be one of the many Americans who, he said, came to
grieve with him for the dead poet.
Now, on my later visit, it was a cold, rainy day, and it was chill
within the house and without, and I imputed my weather to the time of
Keats's sojourn, and thought of him sitting by his table there in that
bare, narrow, stony room and coughing at the dismal outlook. Afterward I
saw the whole place put in order and warmed by a generous stove, for
people who came to see the Keats and Shelley collections of books and
pictures; but still the sense of that day remains.
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