Thither Shelley's ashes were conveyed; and they
rest beneath one of the antique weed-grown towers that recur at
intervals in the circuit of the massy ancient wall of Rome. He selected
the hallowed place himself; there is
'the sepulchre,
Oh, not of him, but of our joy!--
...
And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;
And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned
This refuge for his memory, doth stand
Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath,
A field is spread, on which a newer band
Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death,
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.'
Could sorrow for the lost, and shuddering anguish at the vacancy left
behind, be soothed by poetic imaginations, there was something in
Shelley's fate to mitigate pangs which yet, alas! could not be so
mitigated; for hard reality brings too miserably home to the mourner all
that is lost of happiness, all of lonely unsolaced struggle that
remains. Still, though dreams and hues of poetry cannot blunt grief, it
invests his fate with a sublime fitness, which those less nearly allied
may regard with complacency. A year before he had poured into verse all
such ideas about death as give it a glory of its own.
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