pyre, and the whole was soon enveloped in flame, producing altogether a scene of extraordinary beauty. There was the burning pyre, with a small group of friends standing by in unspoken sorrow. There was one great poet watching as it were the fiery spirit of another passing away on its own proper element; and there was the one beloved friend, for whom Shelley had done so much, whose silent anguish almost unnerved him for the sad spectacle he was called upon to witness.

"The Mediterranean kissed the shore, as if to make peace with it. The yellow sand and blue sky intensely contrasted with each other; marble mountains touched the air with coolness, and the flame of the fire bore away towards heaven in vigorous amplitude waving and quivering with a brightness of inconceivable splendour. It seemed as though it contained the glassy essence of vitality. You might have expected a seraphic countenance to look out of it, turning once more, before it departed, to thank the friends that had done their duty." *

* Leigh Hunt.

As soon as the flames could be extinguished, Mr. Trelawney with indefatigable zeal proceeded to gather up the remains in order to bear them to Mrs. Shelley, and he at length stood before her, his hands scorched and blistered, with a small case, containing the burnt ashes of the poet; and there was all that was left of Shelley, whose transcendant genius, robed as it was in such exceeding glory, cannot so perish, and who but a few weeks since, bent upon offices of good, paced the earth one of the noblest images of his Maker.

A curious coincidence happened in connection with this ceremony.

When the flames were extinguished, and they proceeded to gather up the poet's ashes, it was found that every part of him was consumed except his heart, which was untouched.

This was carried away and preserved in spirits of wine, and an amiable contest took place between Leigh Hunt and Mrs. Shelley for its possession, which Byron compared to the dispute between Ajax and Ulysses for the arms of Achilles; remarking at the same time :-

"What does Hunt want with the heart? he'll

only put it in a glass case, and make sonnets on it."

With the same affectation of indifference, he had remarked on first seeing the body of Shelley, after looking for a moment on its altered appearance:

"Why, this rag of a black handkerchief retains its form better than that human body;" but it was evident he was greatly affected, and exhibited almost as much inability to go through the scene that followed, as Leigh Hunt.

"You can have no idea," he writes to Moore, "what an extraordinary effect such a funeral pyre has on a desert shore, with mountains in the background, and the sea before—the singular appearance the salt and frankincense give to the flames."

Such a close to his career was indeed all that a poet like Shelley might have coveted. His brief existence, to use the expression of Leigh Hunt, had been like that of a spirit that had darted from its orb and found itself in another planet, and when thus suddenly arrested in its course, it seemed as if this spirit had been found in some solitary corner of the earth, its wings

stiffened, its warm heart cold; the relics of a misunderstood nature, slain by the ungenial element. And now, un-associated with the idea of putrefaction or decay, he had cast off his humanity, and had ascended on the wings of fire towards the Infinite, there, in those purer regions of the spiritual which he so loved to contemplate, once more to find his proper sphere.

With as little delay as possible, the poet's remains were taken to Rome, to be deposited in the Protestant cemetery, to which place they were followed by some of the most respectable English families then in the Capitol.

There, close to the tomb of Cestius, under the weed-grown tower, which looks down in antique beauty on the grave of young Adonais, he sleeps

in peace.

CONCLUSION.

"The good die first,

And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket."

THE flames that lighted up Shelley's funeral pyre were not fairly extinguished when the tardy world already began to acknowledge the genius that had departed.

The poet had scarcely anticipated, even in his lifetime, any other than posthumous fame. Living in a strange land, surrounded by a few friends who loved and appreciated him, and whose applause alone he sought, he had been, like his own skylark: