Nor let us weep that our delight is fled
    Far from these carrion kites that scream below. 
  He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
    Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now. 
    Dust to the dust:  but the pure spirit shall flow 5
  Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
    A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
  Through time and change, unquenchably the same,
Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.

39.

  Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep! 
    He hath awakened from the dream of life. 
  ’Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
    With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
    And in mad trance strike with our spirit’s knife 5
  Invulnerable nothings. We decay
    Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
  Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

40.

  He has outsoared the shadow of our night. 
    Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
  And that unrest which men miscall delight,
    Can touch him not and torture not again. 
    From the contagion of the world’s slow stain 5
  He is secure; and now can never mourn
    A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain—­
  Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

41.

  He lives, he wakes—­’tis Death is dead, not he;
    Mourn not for Adonais.—­Thou young Dawn,
  Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
    The spirit thou lamentest is not gone! 
    Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan! 5
  Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains! and thou Air,
    Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
  O’er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!

42.

  He is made one with Nature.  There is heard
    His voice in all her music, from the moan
  Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird. 
    He is a presence to be felt and known
    In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, 5
  Spreading itself where’er that Power may move
    Which has withdrawn his being to its own,
  Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

43.

  He is a portion of the loveliness
    Which once he made more lovely.  He doth bear
  His part, while the One Spirit’s plastic stress
    Sweeps through the dull dense world; compelling there
    All new successions to the forms they wear; 5
  Torturing th’ unwilling dross, that checks its flight,
    To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
  And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the heaven’s light.

44.