Description

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Lord Houghton calls this cemetery 'one of the most beautiful spots on which the eye and heart of man can rest, ' and Shelley speaks of it as making one 'in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place'; and indeed when I saw the violets and the daisies and the poppies that overgrow the tomb, I remembered how the dead poet had once told his friend that he thought the 'intensest pleasure he had received in life was in watching the growth of flowers, ' and how another time, after lying a while quite still, he murmured in some strange prescience of early death, 'I feel the flowers growing over me.'But this time-worn stone and these wildflowers are but poor memorials of one so great as Keats; most of all, too, in this city of Rome, which pays p. 3such honour to her dead; where popes, and emperors, and saints, and cardinals lie hidden in 'porphyry wombs, ' or couched in baths of jasper and chalcedony and malachite, ablaze with precious stones and metals, and tended with continual servi.