THERE is a pretty old inn at Burford Bridge where, I believe, Keats wrote the line, "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever," and calling it out of the window to his friend Leigh Hunt, who was lying on the grass in the sun, Hunt called back, "That will live for ever."
Poor Keats! Poor Poe! With what riches they endowed a thoughtless and ungrateful world! Can it be much of a consolation to their spirits to know that a wealth of sentiment is now showered upon the tombs that hold their once hungering and starved bodies? What law of chance governs rewards and punishments? Who can explain the affluence of a Peter Paul Rubens, a Velasquez, or a Benjamin West, and the poverty of a Rembrandt, a Franz Hals, and a Gilbert Stuart? An Alma Tadema may live in a palace with a golden stair, while a Mathew Maris shades the smoking oil-lamp, that lights his humble room, with a newspaper.
Not far from the inn on the side of Box Hill the author of The Egoist lived—lived and suffered, though he did not die young—in a small Georgian house of ugly, commonplace design, approached through a flowerless front garden hemmed in on all sides by a great box hedge that frowned gloomily down upon bewildered visitors.
It would be idle to attempt to demonstrate that passions are allayed by beautiful surroundings; for crime is as
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