Here pause:  these graves are all too young as yet
    To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned
    Its charge to each; and if the seal is set,
    Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
    Break if not thou! too surely shalt thou find
    Thine own well full, if thou returnest home,
    Of tears and gall.  From the world’s bitter wind
    Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. 
    What Adonais is, why fear we to become?

Yet again the thought of Death as the deliverer, the revealer, and the mystagogue, through whom the soul of man is reunited to the spirit of the universe, returns; and on this solemn note the poem closes.  The symphony of exultation which had greeted the passage of Adonais into the eternal world, is here subdued to a graver key, as befits the mood of one whom mystery and mourning still oppress on earth.  Yet even in the somewhat less than jubilant conclusion we feel that highest of all Shelley’s qualities—­the liberation of incalculable energies, the emancipation and expansion of a force within the soul, victorious over circumstance, exhilarated and elevated by contact with such hopes as make a feebler spirit tremble: 

    The One remains, the many change and pass;
    Heaven’s light for ever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
    Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
    Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
    Until Death tramples it to fragments.—­Die,
    If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! 
    Follow where all is fled!—­Rome’s azure sky,
    Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
    The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

    Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart? 
    Thy hopes are gone before:  from all things here
    They have departed; thou shouldst now depart! 
    A light is past from the revolving year,
    And man and woman; and what still is dear
    Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither. 
    The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near: 
    ’Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither! 
    No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

    That light whose smile kindles the Universe,
    That beauty in which all things work and move,
    That benediction which the eclipsing curse
    Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
    Which through the web of being blindly wove
    By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
    Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
    The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
    Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

    The breath whose might I have invoked in song
    Descends on me; 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.