owned
body was washed ashore, and burned in the presence of Byron and Leigh
Hunt. The ashes were entombed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, with
the epitaph, _Cor cordium_.

Shelley's best and maturest work, nearly all of which was done in Italy,
includes his tragedy, _The Cenci_, 1819, and his lyrical drama,
_Prometheus Unbound_, 1821. The first of these has a unity and a
definiteness of contour unusual with Shelley, and is, with the exception
of some of Robert Browning's, the best English tragedy since Otway.
Prometheus represented to Shelley's mind the human spirit fighting
against divine oppression, and in his portrayal of this figure he kept
in mind not only the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus, but the Satan of
_Paradise Lost_. Indeed, in this poem, Shelley came nearer to the
sublime than any English poet since Milton. Yet it is in lyrical, rather
than in dramatic, quality that _Prometheus Unbound_ is great. If Shelley
be not, as his latest editor, Mr. Forman, claims him to be, the foremost
of English lyrical poets, he is at least the most lyrical of them. He
had, in a supreme degree, the "lyric cry." His vibrant nature trembled
to every breath of emotion, and his nerves craved ever newer shocks; to
pant, to quiver, to thrill, to grow faint in the spasm of intense
sensation. The feminine cast observable in Shelley's portrait is borne
out by this tremulous sensibility in his verse. It is curious how often
he uses the metaphor of wings: of the winged spirit, soaring, like his
skylark, till lost in music, rapture, light, and then falling back to
earth. Three successive moods--longing, ecstasy, and the revulsion of
despair--are expressed in many of his lyrics; as in the _Hymn to the
Spirit of Nature_ in _Prometheus_, in the ode _To a Skylark_, and in the
_Lines to an Indian Air_--Edgar Poe's favorite. His passionate desire to
lose himself in Nature, to become one with that spirit of love and
beauty in the universe which was to him in place of God, is expressed in
the _Ode to the West Wind_, his most perfect poem:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone
Sweet, though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!

In the lyrical pieces already mentioned, together with _Adonais_, the
lines _Written in the Euganean Hills_, _Epipsychidion_, _Stanzas Written