Thou sleep’st upon the shore
    Beside the knelling surge,
    And Sea-nymphs evermore
    Shall sadly chant thy dirge. 
    They come, they come,
    The Spirits of the deep,—­
    While near thy seaweed pillow
    My lonely watch I keep.

    From far across the sea
    I hear a loud lament,
    By Echo’s voice for thee
    From Ocean’s caverns sent. 
    O list!  O list! 
    The Spirits of the deep! 
    They raise a wail of sorrow,
    While I forever weep.

With this last year of the life of Shelley these Notes end.  They are not what I intended them to be.  I began with energy, and a burning desire to impart to the world, in worthy language, the sense I have of the virtues and genius of the beloved and the lost; my strength has failed under the task.  Recurrence to the past, full of its own deep and unforgotten joys and sorrows, contrasted with succeeding years of painful and solitary struggle, has shaken my health.  Days of great suffering have followed my attempts to write, and these again produced a weakness and languor that spread their sinister influence over these notes.  I dislike speaking of myself, but cannot help apologizing to the dead, and to the public, for not having executed in the manner I desired the history I engaged to give of Shelley’s writings. (I at one time feared that the correction of the press might be less exact through my illness; but I believe that it is nearly free from error.  Some asterisks occur in a few pages, as they did in the volume of “Posthumous Poems”, either because they refer to private concerns, or because the original manuscript was left imperfect.  Did any one see the papers from which I drew that volume, the wonder would be how any eyes or patience were capable of extracting it from so confused a mass, interlined and broken into fragments, so that the sense could only be deciphered and joined by guesses which might seem rather intuitive than founded on reasoning.  Yet I believe no mistake was made.)

The winter of 1822 was passed in Pisa, if we might call that season winter in which autumn merged into spring after the interval of but few days of bleaker weather.  Spring sprang up early, and with extreme beauty.  Shelley had conceived the idea of writing a tragedy on the subject of Charles I. It was one that he believed adapted for a drama; full of intense interest, contrasted character, and busy passion.  He had recommended it long before, when he encouraged me to attempt a play.  Whether the subject proved more difficult than he anticipated, or whether in fact he could not bend his mind away from the broodings and wanderings of thought, divested from human interest, which he best loved, I cannot tell; but he proceeded slowly, and threw it aside for one of the most mystical of his poems, the “Triumph of Life”, on which he was employed at the last.