Shelley can hardly have grown more gentle, kind, and affectionate
than his friends always represented him to be up to that disastrous
night when he was drowned in the Mediterranean. Nonsense, again,--
sheer nonsense! What, am I babbling about? I was thinking of that
old figment of his being lost in the Bay of Spezzia, and washed
ashore near Via Reggio, and burned to ashes on a funeral pyre, with
wine, and spices, and frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach
and beheld a flame of marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the
dead poet's heart, and that his fire-purified relics were finally
buried near his child in Roman earth. If all this happened three-
and-twenty years ago, how could I have met the drowned and burned
and buried man here in London only yesterday?

Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr. Reginald Heber,
heretofore Bishop of Calcutta, but recently translated to a see in
England, called on Shelley while I was with him. They appeared to
be on terms of very cordial intimacy, and are said to have a joint
poem in contemplation. What a strange, incongruous dream is the
life of man!

Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel. It will be
issued entire by old John Murray in the course of the present
publishing season. The poet, I hear, is visited with a troublesome
affection of the tongue, which has put a period, or some lesser
stop, to the life-long discourse that has hitherto been flowing from
his lips. He will not survive it above a month, unless his
accumulation of ideas be sluiced off in some other way. Wordsworth
died only a week or two ago. Heaven rest his soul, and grant that
he may not have completed _The Excursion_! Methinks I am sick of
everything he wrote, except his _Laodamia_. It is very sad, this