Enchanted child, born into a world unchildlike; spoiled darling of
Nature, playmate of her elemental daughters; "pard-like spirit, beautiful
and swift," laired amidst the burning fastnesses of his own fervid mind;
bold foot along the verges of precipitous dream; light leaper from crag
to crag of inaccessible fancies; towering Genius, whose soul rose like a
ladder between heaven and earth with the angels of song ascending and
descending it;--he is shrunken into the little vessel of death, and
sealed with the unshatterable seal of doom, and cast down deep below the
rolling tides of Time. Mighty meat for little guests, when the heart of
Shelley was laid in the cemetery of Caius Cestius! Beauty, music,
sweetness, tears--the mouth of the worm has fed of them all. Into that
sacred bridal-gloom of death where he holds his nuptials with eternity
let not our rash speculations follow him. Let us hope rather that as,
amidst material nature, where our dull eyes see only ruin, the finer eye
of science has discovered life in putridity and vigour in decay,--seeing
dissolution even and disintegration, which in the mouth of man symbolise
disorder, to be in the works of God undeviating order, and the manner of
our corruption to be no less wonderful than the manner of our health,--so,
amidst the supernatural universe, some tender undreamed surprise of life
in doom awaited that wild nature, which, worn by warfare with itself, its
Maker, and all the world, now

Sleeps, and never palates more the dug,
The beggar's nurse, and Caesar's.




FOOTNOTES