the high praise your feelings assign me, you are right or wrong. The
poet and the man are two different natures: though they exist together,
they may be unconscious of each other, and incapable of deciding on each
other's powers and efforts by any reflex act. The decision of the cause
whether or not I am a poet is removed from the present time to the hour
when our posterity shall assemble: but the court is a very severe one,
and I fear that the verdict will be "Guilty--death."'


A letter to Mr. Ollier was probably a little later. It says: 'I send you
a sketch for a frontispiece to the poem _Adonais_. Pray let it be put
into the engraver's hands immediately, as the poem is already on its way
to you, and I should wish it to be ready for its arrival. The poem is
beautifully printed, and--what is of more consequence--correctly:
indeed, it was to obtain this last point that I sent it to the press at
Pisa. In a few days you will receive the bill of lading.' Nothing is
known as to the sketch which Shelley thus sent. It cannot, I presume,
have been his own production, nor yet Severn's: possibly it was supplied
by Lieutenant Williams, who had some aptitude as an amateur artist.

I add some of the poet's other expressions regarding _Adonais_, which he
evidently regarded with more complacency than any of his previous
works--at any rate, as a piece of execution. Hitherto his favourite had
been _Prometheus Unbound_: I am fain to suppose that that great effort
did not now hold a second place in his affections, though he may have
considered that the _Adonais_, as being a less arduous feat, came nearer
to reaching its goal. (To Peacock, August, 1821.) 'I have sent you by
the Gisbornes a copy of the Elegy on Keats. The subject, I know, will
not please you; but the composition of the poetry, and the taste in
which it is written, I do not think bad.' (To Hunt, 26 August.) 'Before