Mary Shelley.

The ideas of the Revolution touched him as they had touched Byron and Wordsworth, and although Wordsworth turned away from them disappointed, Shelley held on hopefully.

    “To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
    To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
    To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
    To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
    From its own wreck the thing it contemplates: 
    Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
    This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
    Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
    This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory!"*

    Prometheus Unbound.

One of Shelley’s last poems was an elegy called Adonais.  Under the name of Adonais, he mourns for the death of another poet, John Keats, who died at twenty-six.  Shelley believed when he wrote the poem that Keats had been done to death by the cruel criticisms of his poems, that he had died of a broken heart, because the world neither understood nor sympathized with his poetry.  Shelley himself knew what it was to suffer from unkind criticisms, and so he understood the feelings of another poet.  But although Keats did suffer something from neglect and cruelty, he died of consumption, not of a broken heart.

Adonais ranks with Lycidas as one of the most beautiful elegies in our language.  In it, Shelley calls upon everything, upon every thought and feeling, upon all poets, to weep for the loss of Adonais.

“All he had loved, and moulded into thought
From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,
Lamented Adonais.  Morning sought
Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;
Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,
Pale ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
And the wild winds flew around, sobbing in their dismay.
. . . . . . . 

                “The mountain shepherds came,

Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;
The Pilgrims of Eternity,* whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow; from her wilds Ierne** sent
The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,
And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue.”

Lord Byron.
*Ierne=Ireland sends Thomas Moore to mourn.

He pictures himself, too, among the mourners—­

    “’Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,
    A phantom among men, companionless
    As the last cloud of an expiring storm,
    Whose thunder is its knell.”

Shelley mourned for Keats, little knowing that soon others would mourn for himself.  Little more than a year after writing this poem he too lay dead.

Shelley had passed much of his time on the Continent, and in 1822 he was living in a lonely spot on the shores of the Bay of Spezia.  He always loved the sea, and he here spent many happy hours sailing about the bay in his boat the Don Juan.  Hearing that a friend had arrived from England he sailed to Leghorn to welcome him.