The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

I saw this morning in the paper, half with amusement and half with shame, a letter signed by a long list of the sort of people whom a schoolboy would designate as "buffers," inviting the public to come forward and subscribe for the purchase of the house where Keats died at Rome, in order to make it a sort of Museum, sacred to him and Shelley.

I was amused, because of the strange ineptitude and clumsiness of the proposal. In the first place, to make a shrine of pilgrimage for two of our great English poets in _Rome_, of all places that is fantastic enough; but to select the house which Keats entered a dying man, and where he spent about four months in horrible torture of both mind and body, from which he wrote to his friend Brown, "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence," could anything be more inappropriate? It is not too much, in fact, to say that the house selected to enshrine his memory is the house where he was less himself than at any other period of his short life.