and in the background the marble-flecked Apennines gleamed.
Byron looked on until he could stand it no longer, and swam off
to his yacht. The heart was the last part to be consumed. By
Trelawny's care the ashes were buried in the Protestant
cemetery at Rome.

It is often sought to deepen our sense of this tragedy by
speculating on what Shelley would have done if he had lived.
But, if such a question must be asked, there are reasons for
thinking that he might not have added much to his reputation.
It may indeed be an accident that his last two years were less
fertile in first-rate work than the years 1819 and 1820, and
that his last unfinished poem, 'The Triumph of Life', is even
more incoherent than its predecessors; yet, when we consider
the nature of his talent, the fact is perhaps significant. His
song was entirely an affair of uncontrolled afflatus, and this
is a force which dwindles in middle life, leaving stranded the
poet who has no other resource. Some men suffer spiritual
upheavals and eclipses, in which they lose their old selves and
emerge with new and different powers; but we may be fairly sure
that this would not have happened to Shelley, that as he grew
older he would always have returned to much the same
impressions; for his mind, of one piece through and through,
had that peculiar rigidity which can sometimes be observed in
violently unstable characters. The colour of his emotion would
have fluctuated--it took on, as it was, a deepening shade of
melancholy; but there is no indication that the material on
which it worked would have changed.