VI.] RESIDENCE AT PISA. 145 "sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong"-to the couch where Keats lies dead. There is both pathos and unconscious irony in his making these two poets the chief mourners, when we remember what Byron wrote about Keats in Don Juan, and what Moore afterwards recorded of Shelley; and when we think, moreover, how far both Keats and Shelley have outsoared Moore, and disputed with Byron his supreme place in the heaven of poetry. Midst others of less note, came one frail Form, With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, A pard-like Spirit beautiful and swift A Love in desolation masked-a Power It is a dying lamp, a falling shower, A breaking billow ;-even whilst we speak Is it not broken ? On the withering flower The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break. Shook the weak hand that grasped it. Of that crew A herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter's dart. The second passage is the peroration of the poem. No. where has Shelley expressed his philosophy of man's re L lation to the universe with more sublimity and with a more imperial command of language than in these stanzas. If it were possible to identify that philosophy with any recognized system of thought, it might be called pantheism. But it is difficult to affix a name, stereotyped by the usage of the schools, to the aerial spiritualism of its ardent and impassioned poet's creed. The movement of the long melodious sorrow-song has just been interrupted by three stanzas, in which Shelley lashes the reviewer of Keats. He now bursts forth afresh into the music of consolation : : Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep! He hath awakened from the dream of life. 'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. He has outsoared the shadow of our night; He lives, he wakes-'tis Death is dead, not he; Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan! He is made one with Nature: there is heard In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light. 147 But the absorption of the human soul into primeval nature-forces, the blending of the principle of thought with the universal spirit of beauty, is not enough to satisfy man's yearning after immortality. Therefore in the next three stanzas the indestructibility of the personal self is presented to us, as the soul of Adonais passes into the company of the illustrious dead who, like him, were untimely slain : The splendours of the firmament of time Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there, And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air. The inheritors of unfulfilled renown Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought, Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton Rose pale, his solemn agony had not Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought And as he fell and as he lived and loved, Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot, Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved :— Oblivion as they rose, shrank like a thing reproved. And many more, whose names on Earth are dark, So long as fire outlives the parent spark, "Thou art become as one of us," they cry; "It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long Silent alone amid an Heaven of song. Assume thy wingèd throne, thou Vesper of our throng!” From the more universal and philosophical aspects of his theme, the poet once more turns to the special subject that had stirred him. Adonais lies dead; and those who mourn him, must seek his grave. He has escaped: to follow him is to die; and where should we learn to dote on death unterrified, if not in Rome? In this way the description of Keats's resting-place beneath the pyramid of Cestius, which was also destined to be Shelley's own, is introduced: : Who mourns for Adonais ? oh come forth, Fond wretch! and show thyself and him aright. When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink. |