Shelley tells us of himself, in the introduction,

Death and love are yet contending for their prey,

and in _Adonais_ he appears as

A power
Girt round with weakness.
* * * * *
A light spear ...
Vibrated, as the everbearing heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it.

Shelley's imaginary poet, Lionel, gains in poetical sensibility as
consumption saps his strength:

You might see his colour come and go,
And the softest strain of music made
Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade
Amid the dew of his tender eyes;
And the breath with intermitting flow
Made his pale lips quiver and part.
[Footnote: _Rosalind and Helen_.]

The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White,
_Sonnet to Consumption_.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse, so
affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the cough
became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for the
last time in Tennyson's _The Brook_, where the young poet hastens to
Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame