Well, this young master of song goes to Italy, too--not driven, like Byron, by hue and cry, or like Shelley, restless for change (from Chancellor’s courts) and for wider horizons--but running from the disease which has firm grip upon him, and which some three years after Shelley’s going kills the poet of the _Endymion_ at Rome. His ashes lie in the Protestant burial-ground there--under the shadow of the pyramid of Caius Cestius. Every literary traveller goes to see the grave, and to spell out the words he wanted inscribed there: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Upon that death, Shelley, then living in Pisa, blazed out in the _Adonais_--the poem making, with the _Lycidas_ of Milton, and the _In Memoriam_ of Tennyson, a triplet of laurel garlands, whose leaves will never fade. Yet those of Shelley have a cold rustle in them--shine as they may:-- “Oh, weep for Adonais--he is dead! Wake, melancholy mother, wake and weep! Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep Like his--a mute and uncomplaining sleep. For he is gone where all things wise and fair Descend. Oh, dream not that the amorous deep Will yet restore him to the vital air; Death feeds on his mute voice and laughs at our despair. “Oh, weep for Adonais! The quick dreams, The passion-winged ministers of thought Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught The Love which was its music, wander not-- Wander no more from kindling brain to brain, But droop there whence they sprung; and mourn their lot Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain, They ne’er will gather strength, or find a home again.” The weak place in this impassioned commemorative poem lies in its waste of fire upon the heads of those British critics, who--as flimsy, pathetic legends used to run--slew the poet by their savagery. Keats did not range among giants; but he was far too strong a man to die of the gibes of the _Quarterly_, or the jeers of _Blackwood_. Not this; but all along, throughout his weary life--even amid the high airs of Hampstead, where nightingales sang--he sang, too,-- “I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath.”[76] _Buried in Rome._