record" Shelley's inexpressibly sad exposition of Pantheistic
immortality:

He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely, _etc_.

What desolation can it be that discerns comfort in this hope, whose wan
countenance is as the countenance of a despair? What deepest depth of
agony is it that finds consolation in this immortality: an immortality
which thrusts you into death, the maw of Nature, that your dissolved
elements may circulate through her veins?

Yet such, the poet tells me, is my sole balm for the hurts of life. I am
as the vocal breath floating from an organ. I too shall fade on the
winds, a cadence soon forgotten. So I dissolve and die, and am lost in
the ears of men: the particles of my being twine in newer melodies, and
from my one death arise a hundred lives. Why, through the thin partition
of this consolation Pantheism can hear the groans of its neighbour,
Pessimism. Better almost the black resignation which the fatalist draws
from his own hopelessness, from the fierce kisses of misery that hiss
against his tears.

With some gleams, it is true, of more than mock solace, _Adonais_ is
lighted; but they are obtained by implicitly assuming the personal
immortality which the poem explicitly denies; as when, for instance, to
greet the dead youth,

The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought
Far in the unapparent.

And again the final stanza of the poem:

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 riven;
The massy earth, the sphered skies are given:
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.

The Soul of Adonais?--Adonais, who is but

A portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely.

After all, to finish where we began, perhaps the poems on which the lover
of Shelley leans most lovingly, which he has oftenest in his mind, which
best represent Shelley to him and which he instinctively reverts to when
Shelley's name is mentioned are some of the shorter poems and detached
lyrics. Here Shelley forgets for a while all that ever makes his verse
turbid; forgets that he is anything but a poet, forgets sometimes that he
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