all things shall become a part in
a kind of resurrection of the body, is already visible to the dead and to
souls in ecstasy, for ecstasy is a kind of death. The dying Lionel hears
the song of the nightingale, and cries--

'Heardst thou not sweet words among
That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?
Heardst thou not that those who die
Awake in a world of ecstasy?
How love, when limbs are interwoven,
And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
And thought to the world's dim boundaries clinging,
And music when one beloved is singing,
Is death? Let us drain right joyously
The cup which the sweet bird fills for me.'

And in the most famous passage in all his poetry he sings of Death as of a
mistress. 'Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white
radiance of eternity.' 'Die, if thou wouldst be with that which thou
wouldst seek;' and he sees his own soon-coming death in a rapture of
prophecy, for 'the fire for which all thirst' beams upon him, 'consuming
the last clouds of cold mortality.' When he is dead he will still
influence the living, for though Adonais has fled 'to the burning
fountains whence he came,' and 'is a portion of the eternal which must
glow through time and change unquenchably the same,' and has 'awaked from
the dream of life,' he has not gone from 'the young dawn,' or the 'caverns
in the forests,' or 'the faint flowers and the fountains.' He has been
'made one with nature,' and his voice is 'heard in all her music,' and his
presence is felt wherever 'that power may move which has withdrawn his
being to its own,' and he bears 'his part' when it is compelling mortal
things to their appointed forms, and he overshadows men's minds at their
supreme moments, for

'when lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there,
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.'

'Of his speculations as to what will befall this inestimable spirit when
we appear to die,' Mrs. Shelley has written, 'a mystic ideality tinged
these speculations in Shelley's mind; certain stanzas in the poem of _The
Sensitive Plant_ express, in some degree, the almost inexpressible idea,
not that we die into another state, when this state is no longer, from
some reason, unapparent as well as apparent, accordant with our being--but
that those who rise above the ordinary nature of man, fad