The remaining four years of Shelley’s life were passed in comparative tranquillity in the “Paradise of exiles,” as he called Italy.  He lived chiefly at Pisa, the last eighteen months of his life.  Byron rented the famous Lanfranchi Palace in Pisa and became Shelley’s neighbor, often entertaining him and a group of English friends, among whom were Edward Trelawny, the Boswell of Shelley’s last days, and Leigh Hunt, biographer and essayist.

On July 7, 1822, Shelley said:  “If I die to-morrow, I have lived to be older than my father.  I am ninety years of age.”  The young poet was right in claiming that it is not length of years that measures life.  He had lived longer than most people who reach ninety.  The next day he started in company with two others to sail across the Bay of Spezzia to his summer home.  Friends watching from the shore saw a sudden tempest strike his boat.  When the cloud passed, the craft could not be seen.  Not many months before, he had written the last stanza of Adonais:—­

  “...my spirit’s bark is driven
  Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
  Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
  The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! 
    I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
  Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
    The soul of Adonais, like a star,
  Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.”

Shelley’s body was washed ashore, July 18, and it was burned near the spot, in accordance with Italian law; but the ashes and the unconsumed heart were interred in the beautiful Protestant cemetery at Rome, not far from where Keats was buried the previous year.

Few poets have been loved more than Shelley.  Twentieth century visitors to his grave often find it covered with fresh flowers.  The direction which he wrote for finding the tomb of Keats is more applicable to Shelly’s own resting place:—­

  “Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead
     Thy footsteps to a slope of green access,
  Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead
     A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread."[22]

Works.—­Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude (1816) is a magnificent expression of Shelley’s own restless, tameless spirit, wandering among the grand solitudes of nature in search of the ineffably lovely dream maiden, who was his ideal of beauty.  He travels through primeval forests, stands upon dizzy abysses, plies through roaring whirlpools, all of which are symbolic of the soul’s wayfaring, until at last,—­

  “When on the threshold
  of the green recess,”

his dying glance rests upon the setting moon and the sufferer finds eternal peace.  The general tone of this poem is painfully despairing, but this is relieved by the grandeur of the natural scenes and by many imaginative flights.

[Illustration:  GRAVE OF SHELLEY, PROTESTANT CEMETERY, ROME.]