Then the mist which
had hung all day in the offing swallowed the _Ariel_ for ever.

It was not until many days after this, Trelawney tells us, "that my
worst fears were confirmed. Two bodies were found on the shore--one near
Viareggio, which I went and examined. The face and hands and parts of
the body not protected by the dress were fleshless. The tall, slight
figure, the jacket, the volume of Aeschylus in one pocket, and Keats'
poems[9] in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of
reading, had hastily thrust it away, were all too familiar to me to
leave a doubt in my mind that this mutilated corpse was any other than
Shelley's."

A certain light has been thrown on the manner in which Shelley and his
friend met their death in a letter which Mr. Eyre wrote to the _Times_
in 1875.[10] Trelawney had always believed that the Livorno sailors knew
more than they cared to tell of that tragedy. For one thing, he had seen
an English oar in one of their boats just after the storm; for another
the laws were such in Tuscany, that had a fishing-boat gone to the
rescue of the _Ariel_ and brought off the poet and his companions, she
would with her crew have been sent into quarantine for fear of cholera.
It is not, however, to the Duchy of Tuscany that Shelley owes his death,
but to the cupidity of the Tuscan sailors, one of them having confessed
to the crime of running down the boat, seeing her in danger, in the hope
of finding gold on "the milord Inglese." There seems but little reason
for doubting this story, which Vincent Eyre communicated to the _Times_
in 1875: Trelawney eagerly accepts it, and though Dr. Garnett and
Professor Dowden politely forbear to accuse the Italians, such crimes
appear to have been sufficiently common in those days to confirm us,
however reluctantly, in this explanation. Thus died perhaps the greatest
lyric poet that even England had ever borne, an exile, and yet not an
exile, for he died in Italy, the fatherland of us all. Ah! "'tis Death
is dead, not he," for in the west wind you may hear his song, and in the
tender night his rare mysterious music; when the skylark sings it is as
it were his melody, and in the clouds you may find something of the
refreshment of his spirit.

"Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."

FOOTNOTES:

[8] For the identity of this inn see Leigh Hunt, _Autobiography_.
Constable, 1903, vol. ii.