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! 
    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!

    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,
    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    Which has withdrawn his being to its own;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.

    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;
    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.

But the absorption of the human soul into primeval nature-forces, the blending of the principle of thought with the universal spirit of beauty, is not enough to satisfy man’s yearning after immortality.  Therefore in the next three stanzas the indestructibility of the personal self is presented to us, as the soul of Adonais passes into the company of the illustrious dead who, like him, were untimely slain:—­

    The splendours of the firmament of time
    May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not: 
    Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
    And death is a low mist which cannot blot
    The brightness it may veil.  When lofty thought
    Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
    And love and life contend in it, for what
    Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there,
    And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

    The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
    Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
    Far in the Unapparent.  Chatterton
    Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
    Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
    And as he fell, and as he lived and loved,
    Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,
    Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:—­
    Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.