diance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.--Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!--Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is past from the revolving year,
And man and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near:
'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither!
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

That light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That beauty in which all things work and move,
That benediction which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given.
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

It will be seen that, whatever Shelley may from time to time have said
about the immortality of the soul, he was no materialist, and no
believer in the extinction of the spiritual element by death. Yet he was
too wise to dogmatize upon a problem which by its very nature admits of
no solution in this world. "I hope," he said, "but my hopes are not
unmixed with fear for what will befall this inestimable spirit when we
appear to die." On another occasion he told Trelawny, "I am content to
see no farther into futurity than Plato and Bacon. My mind is tranquil;
I have no fears and some hopes. In our present gross material state our
faculties are clouded; when Death removes our clay coverings, the
mystery will be solved." How constantly the thought of death as the
revealer was present to his mind, may be gathered from an incident
relat