contemptuous attack on his work, of the consumption which
killed him at the age of twenty-six. He was sent to Italy as a
last chance. Shelley, who was then at Pisa, proposed to nurse
him back to health, and offered him shelter. Keats refused the
invitation, and died at Rome on February 23, 1821. Shelley was
not intimate with Keats, and had been slow to recognise his
genius; but it was enough that he was a poet, in sympathy with
the Radicals, an exile, and the victim of the Tory reviewers.
There is not ill Adonais that note of personal bereavement
which wails through Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' or Cowley's 'Ode
on the Death of Mr. Hervey'. Much, especially in the earlier
stanzas, is common form. The Muse Urania is summoned to
lament, and a host of personified abstractions flit before us,
"like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream"--


"Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions, and veiled Destinies,
Splendours and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of Hopes and Fears, and twilight Fantasies."

At first he scarcely seems to know what it is that he wants to
say, but as he proceeds he warms to his work. The poets gather
round Adonais' bier, and in four admirable stanzas Shelley
describes himself as "a phantom among men," who

"Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness,
Actaeon-like; and now he fled astray
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts along that rugged way