Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,
    A phantom among men, companionless
    As the last cloud of an expiring storm,
    Whose thunder is its knell.  He, as I guess,
    Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness,
    Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray
    With feeble steps o’er the world’s wilderness,
    And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
    Pursued like raging hounds their father and their prey.

    A pard-like Spirit beautiful and swift—­
    A love in desolation masked—­a Power
    Girt round with weakness; it can scarce uplift
    The weight of the superincumbent hour;
    Is it a dying lamp, a falling shower,
    A breaking billow;—­even whilst we speak
    Is it not broken?  On the withering flower
    The killing sun smiles brightly:  on a cheek
    The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.

    His head was bound with pansies over-blown,
    And faded violets, white and pied and blue;
    And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,
    Round whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew
    Yet dripping with the forest’s noon-day dew,
    Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart
    Shook the weak hand that grasped it.  Of that crew
    He came the last, neglected and apart;
    A herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter’s dart.

The second passage is the peroration of the poem.  Nowhere has Shelley expressed his philosophy of man’s relation to the universe with more sublimity and with a more imperial command of language than in these stanzas.  If it were possible to identify that philosophy with any recognized system of thought, it might be called pantheism.  But it is difficult to affix a name, stereotyped by the usage of the schools, to the aerial spiritualism of its ardent and impassioned poet’s creed.

The movement of the long melodious sorrow-song has just been interrupted by three stanzas, in which Shelley lashes the reviewer of Keats.  He now bursts forth afresh into the music of consolation:—­

    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
    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.

    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
    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.