I found this expansive metaphor for life moving, particularly coming from a man who grabbed as much of it as he could before it was snatched from him by illness and premature death.  It also struck me as a suitable response – or riposte – to a question raised by Thoreau writing about 30 years later.

‘Well – I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments.’ (3 May 1818)

Source: John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford World Classics, 2002/2009), p. 89

Photo credits: Annie Spratt at unsplash