new forms,
and subserve a re-growth of life, as in the flowers which bedeck
the grave. From this single and impressive instance the poet
passes to the general and unfailing law--No material object of
which we have cognizance really dies: all such objects are in a
perpetual cycle of change. This conception has been finely
developed in a brace of early poems of Lord Tennyson, _All Things
will Die_, and _Nothing will Die_:--

'The stream will cease to flow,
The wind will cease to blow,
The clouds will cease to fleet,
The heart will cease to beat--
For all things must die.

* * * * *

'The stream flows,
The wind blows,
The cloud fleets,
The heart beats,
Nothing will die.
Nothing will die;
All things will change
Through eternity.'

11. 6-8. _Shall that alone which knows Be as a sword consumed before the
sheath By sightless lightning?_ From the axiom 'Nought we know dies'--an
axiom which should be understood as limited to what we call material
objects (which Shelley however considered to be indistinguishable, in
essence, from ideas, see p, 56)--he proceeds to the question, 'Shall
that alone which knows'--i.e. shall the mind alone--die and be
annihilated? If the mind were to die, while the body continues extant
(not indeed in the form of a human body, but in various phases of
ulterior development), then the mind would resemble a sword which, by
the action of lightning, is consumed (molten, dissolved) within its
sheath, while the sheath itself remains unconsumed. This is put as a
question, and Shelley does not supply an answer to it here, though the
terms in which his enquiry is couched seem intended to suggest a reply
to the effect that the mind shall _not_ die. The meaning of the epithet
'sightless,' as applied to lightning, seems disputable. Of course the
primary sense of this word is 'not-seeing, blind'; but Shelley would
probably not have scrupled to use it in the sense of 'unseen.' I incline
to suppose that Shelley means 'unseen'; not so much that the lightning
is itself unseen as that its action in fusing the sword, which remains
concealed within the sheath, is unseen. But the more obvious sense of
'blind, unregardful,' could also be justified.

11. 8, 9. _Th' intense atom glows A moment, then is quenched in a most
cold repose._ The term 'th' intense atom' is a synonym for 'that which
knows,' or the mind. By death it is 'quenched in a most co