Erased its light vestige with shadowy sweep,
Like a sunny storm o'er the dark-green deep.

I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet
Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet;
I doubt not they felt the spirit that came
From her glowing fingers through all their frame.

She sprinkled bright water from the stream
On those that were faint with the sunny beam,
And out of the cups of the heavy flowers
She emptied the rain of the thunder-showers.

She lifted their heads with her tender hands,
And sustained them with rods and osier bands;
If the flowers had been her own infants she
Could never have nursed them more tenderly.

And all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore in a basket of Indian woof
Into the rough woods far aloof.

In a basket, of grasses and wild-flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull,
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.

And many an antenatal tomb,

Where butterflies dream of the life to come,
She left clinging ground the smooth and dark
Edge of the odorous cedar bark.

This fairest creature from earliest spring
Thus moved through the garden, ministering

All the sweet season of summer-tide,

And, ere the first leaf looked brown, she died.

PART III.

Three days the flowers of the garden fair
Like stars, when the moon is awakened, were,

Or the waves of Baiæ, ere luminous

She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.

And on the fourth the sensitive plant
Felt the sound of the funeral chant ;

And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,
And the sobs of the mourners, deep and low.

The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass,
Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass ;
From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone,
And sate in the pines, and gave groan for groan.

The garden, once fair, became cold and foul,
Like the corpse of her who had been its soul;
Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,
Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap
To make men tremble who never weep.

Swift summer into the autumn flowed,
And frost in the mist of the morning rode,
Though the noon-day sun looked clear and bright,
Mocking the spoil of the secret night.

Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks
Were bent and tangled across the walks;
And the leafless network of parasite bowers
Massed into ruin, and all sweet flowers.

Between the time of the wind and the snow,

All loathliest weeds began to grow,

Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck, Like the water-snake's belly, and the toad's back;

And plants at whose names the verse feels loath,
Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,-
Prickly and pulpous, and blistering and blue,

The sensitive plant, like one forbid,

Wept, and the tears within each lid

Of its folded leaves, which together grew,
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.

For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon
By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn;
The sap shrank to the root through every pore,
As blood to a heart that will beat no more.

For Winter came; the wind was his whip;
One choppy finger was on his lip;

He had torn the cataracts from the hills,
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles.

His breath was a chain which, without a sound,
The earth and the air and the water bound;
He came fiercely driven in his chariot-throne
By the tenfold blasts of the Arctic zone.

Then the weeds, which were forms of living death,
Fled from the frost to the earth beneath;
Their decay, and sudden flight from frost,
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost.

And under the roots of the sensitive plant
The moles and the dormice died for want;
The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air,

And were caught in the branches naked and bare.

When winter had gone, and spring came back,

The sensitive plant was a leafless wreck;

But the mandrakes and toad-stools and docks and darnels
Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.

The Cenci,

In Pisa Shelley's best poems were written, Hellas, The Witch of Atlas, Adonais, The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and nearly all the shorter poems of which I have spoken. The last thing he ever wrote was The Triumph of Time, which was left unfinished, and was published by his wife in as perfect a shape as she could bring it from his scattered papers.

In the spring of 1822 Shelley left Pisa and took a house on the west coast of Italy, near the village of Lerici. He was very fond of the sea, and had ordered a yacht built, in which he and a warm friend, Captain Williams, were going to spend many a day on the blue Italian waters close at hand. On the sixteenth of May the yacht arrived. Shelley was as pleased with it as a boy with a long-wished-for toy. They made several excursions in the boat, which was named "Don Juan," from Byron's poem, and finally came down to Leghorn in her. After a few days' stay here, Shelley and Williams started back in the boat for the town of Spezzia, on the Gulf of Spezzia, not far from their home.

This was the last ever seen of them. A sudden sea-storm came shortly after they started, with a dense fog. The little boat was probably run down by some larger vessel. After several days of waiting - terrible days for Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams- the bodies were found washed up, wave-beaten and almost fleshless, on the shore. What was left of the two bodies was burned on a funeral-pile built on the sandy shore, and their ashes were buried in the cemetery in Florence. Byron was foremost in this strange burial rite, aided by Leigh Hunt and by Captain Trelawney, who was a friend of both the dead.

Thus, in the real opening of life, at the point where what was best in him seemed ready or fruition, Shelley died. Men of much less genius have gained a larger fame and held a higher place in the annals of literature. But as he is one of the most poetic of poets, he will always be loved by those of his own guild; his thought will take deep root in the hearts of other poets, and serve for their inspiration. For himself he died too young; the promise of his life was thwarted by his early death. Up to the time of his death he had been restless and unsettled in spirit. The seething waves of thought in his brain should have had time to cool and settle into tranquillity. Dying at thirty, he had not reached the serene heights where the poet ought to dwell. If he had lived longer, I feel sure time would have ripened him into a grand maturity, would have taught him trust and patience, and brought him to a calm which in his brief life he had not reached.

LVI.

ON JOHN KEATS.

NE of Shelley's most touching and beautiful poems is

ONE

his Adonais, the lament for Keats. I wish it were not too long for me to quote it all; I can give you here only a few verses:

"Oh, weep for Adonais ! — The quick dreams,

The passion-winged ministers of thought,

Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams

Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught

The love which was its music, wander not,

Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain,

But droop there whence they sprung; and mourn their lot,
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,
They ne'er will gather strength, nor find a home again.

"One from a lucid urn of starry dew

Washed his light limbs, as if embalming them;
Another clipt her profuse locks, and threw
The wreath upon him, like an anadem,
Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem;
Another in her wilful grief would break
Her bow and winged reeds, as if to stem

A greater loss with one which was more weak,
And dull the barbed fire against his frozen cheek.

"Another Splendor on his mouth alit,

That mouth whence it was wont to draw the breath
Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit,
And pass into the panting heart beneath

With lightning and with music; the damp death
Quenched its caress upon its icy lips;

And as a dying meteor stains a wreath

Of moonlight vapor, which the cold night clips,

It flashed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse.

"All he had loved, and moulded into thought,

From shape and hue and odor 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 aërial eyes that kindle day;

Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,

Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,

And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay."

The tenderness Shelley shows for Keats in this beautiful elegiac poem, which reminds me of Spenser's lament for Sidney, is made more touching by the fact that when Shelley's poor disfigured body was found washed up on the shore near which he had been drowned, one pocket of his jacket had a volume of Keats in it, doubled back, as if