_The Witch of Atlas_ (1820), _Epipsychidion_ (1821), _Adonais_ (1821), and the exquisite lyrics, _The Cloud, To a Skylark_ and _Ode to the West Wind_ are the most beautiful of the remaining works. The first two mentioned are the most elusive of Shelley's poems. With scarcely an echo in his soul of the shadows and discords of earth, the poet paints, in these works, lands-- "...'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea, Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity;" where all is-- "Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise."[23] _Adonais_ is a lament for the early death of Keats, and it stands second in the language among elegiac poems, ranking next to Milton's _Lycidas_. Shelley referred to _Adonais as "perhaps the least imperfect of my compositions." His biographer, Edward Dowden, calls it "the costliest monument ever erected to the memory of an English singer," who "...bought, with price of purest breath, A grave among the eternal." Mrs. Shelley put some of her most sacred mementos of the poet between the leaves of _Adonais_, which spoke to her of his own immortality and omnipresence:-- "Naught we know dies. Shall that alone which knows Be as a sword consumed before the sheath By sightless lightning? * * * * * He is a portion of the loveliness, Which once he made more lovely." Although some of Shelley's shorter poems are more popular, nothing that he ever wrote surpasses _Adonais_ in completeness, poetic thought, and perfection of artistic finish. Treatment of Nature.--Shelley was not interested in things themselves, but in their elusive, animating spirit. In the lyric poem, _To Night_, he does not address himself to mere darkness, but to the active, dream-weaving "Spirit of Night." The very spirit of the autumnal wind seems to him to breathe on the leaves and turn them-- "Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes."[24] In his spiritual conception of nature, he was profoundly affected by Wordsworth; but he goes farther than the older poet in giving expression to the strictly individual forms of nature. Wordsworth pictures nature as a reflection of his own thoughts and feelings. In _The Prelude_ he says:-- "To unorganic natures were transferred My own enjoyments." Shelley, on the other hand, is most satisfying and original when his individual spirit forms in night, cloud, skylark, and wind are made to sing, not as a reflection of his own mood, but as these spirit forces might themselves be supposed to sing, if they could express their song in human language without the aid of a poet. In the lyric, _The Cloud_, it is the animating spirit of the Cloud itself that sings the song:--