them there.”  Trelawney answered, “They will soon have the land-breeze.”  “Maybe,” continued the mate, “she will soon have too much breeze; that gaff topsail is foolish in a boat with no deck and no sailor on board.”  Then, pointing to the south-west,—­“Look at those black lines and the dirty rags hanging on them out of the sky—­they are a warning; look at the smoke on the water; the devil is brewing mischief.”  Then the mist which had hung all day in the offing swallowed the Ariel for ever.

It was not until many days after this, Trelawney tells us, “that my worst fears were confirmed.  Two bodies were found on the shore—­one near Viareggio, which I went and examined.  The face and hands and parts of the body not protected by the dress were fleshless.  The tall, slight figure, the jacket, the volume of Aeschylus in one pocket, and Keats’ poems[9] in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away, were all too familiar to me to leave a doubt in my mind that this mutilated corpse was any other than Shelley’s.”

A certain light has been thrown on the manner in which Shelley and his friend met their death in a letter which Mr. Eyre wrote to the Times in 1875.[10] Trelawney had always believed that the Livorno sailors knew more than they cared to tell of that tragedy.  For one thing, he had seen an English oar in one of their boats just after the storm; for another the laws were such in Tuscany, that had a fishing-boat gone to the rescue of the Ariel and brought off the poet and his companions, she would with her crew have been sent into quarantine for fear of cholera.  It is not, however, to the Duchy of Tuscany that Shelley owes his death, but to the cupidity of the Tuscan sailors, one of them having confessed to the crime of running down the boat, seeing her in danger, in the hope of finding gold on “the milord Inglese.”  There seems but little reason for doubting this story, which Vincent Eyre communicated to the Times in 1875:  Trelawney eagerly accepts it, and though Dr. Garnett and Professor Dowden politely forbear to accuse the Italians, such crimes appear to have been sufficiently common in those days to confirm us, however reluctantly, in this explanation.  Thus died perhaps the greatest lyric poet that even England had ever borne, an exile, and yet not an exile, for he died in Italy, the fatherland of us all.  Ah! “’tis Death is dead, not he,” for in the west wind you may hear his song, and in the tender night his rare mysterious music; when the skylark sings it is as it were his melody, and in the clouds you may find something of the refreshment of his spirit.

    “Nothing of him that doth fade
    But doth suffer a sea-change
    Into something rich and strange.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[8] For the identity of this inn see Leigh Hunt, Autobiography.  Constable, 1903, vol. ii. p. 123.