Keats died in Rome on 23 February, 1821.  Soon afterwards Shelley wrote his Adonais.  He has left various written references to Adonais, and to Keats in connexion with it:  these will come more appropriately when I speak of that poem itself.  But I may here at once quote from the letter which Shelley addressed on 16 June, 1821, to Mr. Gisborne, who had sent on to him a letter from Colonel Finch[10], giving a very painful account of the last days of Keats, and especially (perhaps in more than due proportion) of the violence of temper which he had exhibited.  Shelley wrote thus:  ’I have received the heartrending account of the closing scene of the great genius whom envy and ingratitude[11] scourged out of the world.  I do not think that, if I had seen it before, I could have composed my poem.  The enthusiasm of the imagination would have overpowered the sentiment.  As it is, I have finished my Elegy; and this day I send it to the press at Pisa.  You shall have a copy the moment it is completed, I think it will please you.  I have dipped my pen in consuming fire for his destroyers:  otherwise the style is calm and solemn[12].

As I have already said, the last residence of Shelley was on the Gulf of Spezzia.  He had a boat built named the Ariel (by Byron, the Don Juan), boating being his favourite recreation; and on 1 July, 1822, he and Lieut.  Williams, along with a single sailor-lad, started in her for Leghorn, to welcome there Leigh Hunt.  The latter had come to Italy with his family, on the invitation of Byron and Shelley, to join in a periodical to be called The Liberal.  On 8 July Shelley, with his two companions, embarked to return to Casa Magni.  Towards half-past six in the evening a sudden and tremendous squall sprang up.  The Ariel sank, either upset by the squall, or (as some details of evidence suggest) run down near Viareggio by an Italian fishing-boat, the crew of which had plotted to plunder her of a sum of money.  The bodies were eventually washed ashore; and on 16 August the corpse of Shelley was burned on the beach under the direction of Trelawny.  In the pocket of his jacket had been found two books—­a Sophocles, and the Lamia volume, doubled back as if it had at the last moment been thrust aside.  His ashes were collected, and, with the exception of the heart which was delivered to Mrs. Shelley, were buried in Rome, in the new Protestant Cemetery.  The corpse of Shelley’s beloved son William had, in 1819, been interred hard by, and in 1821 that of Keats, in the old Cemetery—­a space of ground which had, by 1822, been finally closed.