On the morning of the third day after the storm, Trelawny rode to Pisa, and communicated his fears to Hunt.  “I then went upstairs to Byron.  When I told him, his lip quivered, and his voice faltered as he questioned me.”  Couriers were despatched to search the sea-coast, and to bring the “Bolivar” from Leghorn.  Trelawny rode in person toward Via Reggio, and there found a punt, a water-keg, and some bottles, which had been in Shelley’s boat.  A week passed, Trelawny patrolling the shore with the coast-guardsmen, but hearing of no new discovery, until at last two bodies were cast upon the sand.  One found near the Via Reggio, on the 18th of July, was Shelley’s.  It had his jacket, “with the volume of Aeschylus in one pocket, and Keats’s poems in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away.”  The other, found near the tower of Migliarino, at about four miles’ distance, was that of Williams.  The sailor-boy, Charles Vivian, though cast up on the same day, the 18th of July, near Massa, was not heard of by Trelawny till the 29th.

Nothing now remained but to tell the whole dreadful truth to the two widowed women, who had spent the last days in an agony of alternate despair and hope at Villa Magni.  This duty Trelawny discharged faithfully and firmly.  “The next day I prevailed on them,” he says, “to return with me to Pisa.  The misery of that night and the journey of the next day, and of many days and nights that followed, I can neither describe nor forget.”  It was decided that Shelley should be buried at Rome, near his friend Keats and his son William, and that Williams’s remains should be taken to England.  But first the bodies had to be burned; and for permission to do this Trelawny, who all through had taken the lead, applied to the English Embassy at Florence.  After some difficulty it was granted.

What remains to be said concerning the cremation of Shelley’s body on the 6th of August, must be told in Trelawny’s own words.  Williams, it may be stated, had been burned on the preceding day.

“Three white wands had been stuck in the sand to mark the poet’s grave, but as they were at some distance from each other, we had to cut a trench thirty yards in length, in the line of the sticks, to ascertain the exact spot, and it was nearly an hour before we came upon the grave.

“In the meantime Byron and Leigh Hunt arrived in the carriage, attended by soldiers, and the Health Officer, as before.  The lonely and grand scenery that surrounded us, so exactly harmonized with Shelley’s genius, that I could imagine his spirit soaring over us.  The sea, with the islands of Gorgona, Capraja, and Elba, was before us; old battlemented watch-towers stretched along the coast, backed by the marble-crested Apennines glistening in the sun, picturesque from their diversified outlines, and not a human dwelling was in sight.