As we listen to the lark singing we look upward and see the light summer clouds driving over the blue sky. They, too, have a song which once the listening poet heard.

That is one of Shelley's happiest poems. For most of his poems have at least a tone of sadness, even the joyous song of the skylark leaves us with a sigh on our lips, "our sincerest" laughter with some pain is fraught." But The Cloud  is full only of joy and movement, and of the laughter of innocent mischief. It is as if we saw the boy Shelley again.

We find his sadness, too, in his Ode to the West Wind, but it ends on a note of hope. Here are the last verses—

Shelley sang of Love as well as of the beauty of all things. Here is a little poem, some lines of which are often quoted—

And when his heart was crushed with the knowledge of the wrong and cruelty in the world, it was through love alone that he saw the way to better and lovelier things. "To purify life of its misery and evil was the ruling passion of his soul," said one who loved him and knew him perhaps better than any living being. And it was through love and the beauty of love that he hoped for the triumph of human weal.

The ideas of the Revolution touched him as they had touched Byron and Wordsworth, and although Wordsworth turned away from them disappointed, Shelley held on hopefully.

One of Shelley's last poems was an elegy called Adonais. Under the name of Adonais, he mourns for the death of another poet, John Keats, who died at twenty-six. Shelley believed when he wrote the poem that Keats had been done to death by the cruel criticisms of his poems, that he had died of a broken heart, because the world neither understood nor sympathized with his poetry. Shelley himself knew what it was to suffer from unkind criticisms, and so he understood the feelings of another poet. But although Keats did suffer something from neglect and cruelty, he died of consumption, not of a broken heart.

Adonais  ranks with Lycidas  as one of the most beautiful elegies in our language. In it, Shelley calls upon everything, upon every thought and feeling, upon all poets, to weep for the loss of Adonais.

He pictures himself, too, among the mourners—

Shelley mourned for Keats, little knowing that soon others would mourn for himself. Little more than a year after writing this poem he too lay dead.

Shelley had passed much of his time on the Continent, and in 1822 he was living in a lonely spot on the shores of the Bay of Spezia. He always loved the sea, and he here spent many happy hours sailing about the bay in his boat the Don Juan. Hearing that a friend had arrived from England he sailed to Leghorn to welcome him.

Shelley met his friend, and after a week spent with him and with Lord Byron, he set out for home. The little boat never reached its port, for on the journey it was wrecked, we shall never know how. A few days later Shelley's body was thrown by the waves upon the sandy shore. In his pocket was found a copy of Keats's poems doubled back, as if he had been reading to the last moment and hastily thrust the book into his pocket. The body was cremated upon the shore, and the ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, not far from the grave of Keats. "It is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." So Shelley himself had written in the preface to Adonais.

Over his grave was placed a simple stone with the date of his birth and death and the words "Cor Cordium"—heart of hearts. Beneath these words are some lines from the Tempest  which Shelley had loved—

Poems of Shelley, selected and arranged for use in schools, by E. E. Speight.