Keary

Keary, Annie (1825-79), novelist, was born at Bilton Rectory, Yorkshire. After publishing several children's books, she began novel-writing, Castle Baly (1875) being perhaps her best effort. She was also the author of Early Egyptian History (she had spent the winter of 1858 in Egypt), and The Nations Around. Her last novel, A Boubti/tu) Heart, was finished by Mrs. K. Macquoid. A memoir of her was written by her sister Eliza, wl> collaborated with her in Heroes of Asgard.

Eeats, John, was born on the 31st October, 1795. His father, ostler in the livery stables of Mr. Jennings, at Moorfields, married his employer's daughter, and carried on the business after him. He died when his son was nine years old, and his widow soon married again, but unhappily. Separating from her husband, she retired to Edmonton, which therefore became the home of the poet, who was already at school at Enfield, where he formed a lifelong friendship with his master's son, Charles Cowden Clarke. Upon the death of his mother in 1810 he became ward of Kichard Abbey, a tea-dealer, who apprenticed him to a surgeon at Edmonton named Hammond, and his next years were passed between the study of medicine and that of literature. He knew no Greek, but at school he had fallen under the fascination of the Greek spirit, as revealed in the stories of mythology. He now felt the influence of Spenser, and began to turn for inspiration to him and to the other writers of the Elizabethan age, rather than to the authors of the eighteenth century. Before long he quarrelled with Mr. Hammond, and in 1814 went to London to attend the combined courses of St. Thomas's and Guy's Hospitals. He passed his examination in due course at Apothecaries' Hall, but already recognised that his calling was to letters. Clarke introduced him to Leigh Hunt, at whose house he met many literary men. Haydon, J. H. Reynolds, Joseph Severn, and Charles Dilke became his close friends. Among his acquaintances were Shelley, Godwin, Wordsworth, Lanib, and Hazlitt. Several of his sonnets were published by Hunt in The Examiner, and republished, with other poems, in book form in 1817. He then went, for a time of solitary study, to the Isle of Wight, where he began Endymion. This poem he brought out in the following year, which was also marked by the composition of Isabella and by a walking tour in Scotland, the fatigues of which caused an affection of the throat that was never entirely cured. He returned to encounter harsh reviews in Blackwood and The Quarterly Review, but this did not prevent his beginning another poem, Hyperion, which, having written two versions of the earlier part, he laid aside as too Miltonic in tone. He now lived chiefly at Hampstead, where he became engaged to Miss Fanny Brawne. The engagement was not a happy one. His passion preyed upon a mind already fevered by ill-health and the "continual burning of thought." Yet the following year was a noble creative period. In it he wrote The Eve of St. Agnes, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, and La Belle Dame sans Merci, At the same time he composed the dialogue for a tragedy, Otho the Great - of which his friend Brown supplied the plot - his poem Lamia, and part of a comic "faery "poem, The Cap and Bells. At this point his work was broken by consumption. Ordered to Italy, he went to Rome with Severn, who nursed him tenderly until the end came on the 21st February, 1821. His epitaph is in the Adonais of Shelley, written under the false impression that the Quarterly article had killed him, but embodying a magnificent tribute to his genius and his love for nature. Much in his poems was immature, but as a whole they are without a rival in the glow of feeling which cast the richer and more complex moods of modern life into classical forms, and in the wealth of imagery which fulfilled his aim "to load every rift with ore."