rogress and freedom, releases Prometheus, and spreads
liberty and happiness through all the world. Then the Moon, the Earth,
and the Voices of the Air break forth into a magnificent chant of
praise. The most delicate fancies, the most gorgeous imagery, and the
most fiery, exultant emotions are combined in this poem with something
of the stateliness of its Greek prototype. The swelling cadences of
the blank verse and the tripping rhythm of the lyrics are the product
of a nature rich in rare and wonderful melodies.

_The Witch of Atlas_ (1820), _Epipsychidion_ (1821), _Adonais_ (1821),
and the exquisite lyrics, _The Cloud, To a Skylark_ and _Ode to the
West Wind_ are the most beautiful of the remaining works. The first
two mentioned are the most elusive of Shelley's poems. With scarcely
an echo in his soul of the shadows and discords of earth, the poet
paints, in these works, lands--

"...'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea,
Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity;"

where all is--

"Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise."[23]

_Adonais_ is a lament for the early death of Keats, and it stands
second in the language among elegiac poems, ranking next to Milton's
_Lycidas_. Shelley referred to _Adonais as "perhaps the least
imperfect of my compositions." His biographer, Edward Dowden, calls it
"the costliest monument ever erected to the memory of an English
singer," who

"...bought, with price of purest breath,
A grave among the eternal."

Mrs. Shelley put some of her most sacred mementos of the poet between
the leaves of _Adonais_, which spoke to her of his own immortality and
omnipresence:--

"Naught we know dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
By sightless lightning?
* * * * *
He is a portion of the loveliness,
Which once he made more lovely."

Although some of Shelley's shorter poems are more popular, nothing
that he ever wrote surpasses _Adonais_ in completeness, poetic
thought, and perfection of artistic finish.

Treatment of Nature.--Shelley was not interested in things
themselves, but in their elusive, animating spirit. In the lyric poem,
_To Night_, he does not address himself to mere darkness, but to the
active, dream-weaving "Spirit of Night." The very spirit of the
autumnal wind seems to him to breathe on the leaves and turn them--

"Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes.