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 it seemed as if this spirit had been found in some solitary corner of the earth, its wings

course,

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:

"A poet hidden

In the light of thought,

Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world was-wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not;" and the beauty of his inspirations was left for more impartial readers to discover, than they who sat in judgment on him while he lived.

"There is another man gone," said Byron, alluding to Shelley's death, "about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it."

It is not a little singular, however, that Byron's own biographer should be among the first to justify the bitterness of this reflection. I have already shewn how Moore endeavoured to disturb the harmony in which Byron and Shelley lived; but though, during Shelley's lifetime, he could speak of him in the most intolerant language, we find him writing, after the poet's death, in the following manner :

"The melancholy death of poor Shelley seems to have affected Lord Byron's mind less with grief for the actual loss of his friend, than with bitter indignation against those who had through

life so grossly misrepresented him; and never certainly was there an instance where the supposed absence of all religion in an individual, was assumed so eagerly as an excuse for the absence of all charity in judging him. Though never personally acquainted with Mr. Shelley, I can join freely with those who most loved him, in admiring the various excellences of his heart and genius, and lamenting the too early doom that robbed us of us of the mature fruits of both.

"His short life had been like his poetry, a sort of bright, erroneous dream-false in the general principles on which it proceeded, though beautiful and attaching in most of the details; had full time been allowed for the overlight' of his imagination to have been tempered down by the judgment, which in him was still in reserve, the world at large would have been taught to pay that high homage to his genius, which those only who saw what he was capable of, can now be expected to accord to it."

Had the poet lived it is impossible to say what the extraordinary efforts of his genius might not have produced, combined with maturer judgment,