who was then at Pisa, proposed to nurse him back
to health, and offered him shelter. Keats refused the invitation, and
died at Rome on February 23, 1821. Shelley was not intimate with Keats,
and had been slow to recognise his genius; but it was enough that he was
a poet, in sympathy with the Radicals, an exile, and the victim of
the Tory reviewers. There is not ill Adonais that note of personal
bereavement which wails through Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' or Cowley's
'Ode on the Death of Mr. Hervey'. Much, especially in the earlier
stanzas, is common form. The Muse Urania is summoned to lament, and a
host of personified abstractions flit before us, "like pageantry of mist
on an autumnal stream"--

"Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions, and veiled Destinies,
Splendours and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of Hopes and Fears, and twilight Fantasies."

At first he scarcely seems to know what it is that he wants to say, but
as he proceeds he warms to his work. The poets gather round Adonais'
bier, and in four admirable stanzas Shelley describes himself as "a
phantom among men," who

"Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness,
Actaeon-like; and now he fled astray
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts along that rugged way
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey."

The Quarterly Reviewer is next chastised, and at last Shelley has found
his cue. The strain rises from thoughts of mortality to the consolations
of the eternal:

"Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!
He hath awakened from the dream of life.
'Tis we, who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife."

Keats is made "one with Nature"; he is a parce of that power

"Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above."

It is once more the same conviction, the offspring of his philosophy
and of his suffering, that we noticed in Hellas, only here the pathos is
more acute. So strong is the sense of his own misery, the premonition of
his own death, that we scarcely know, nor does it matter, whether it
is in the person of Keats or of himself that he is lamenting the
impermanence of earthly good. His spirit was hastening to escape from
"the last clouds of cold mortality"; his bark is driven

"Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest g