And it must not be forgotten that while he wrote them he was enduring great physical suffering, and mental anxiety amounting to torture. Perhaps it is for this very reason they are so beautiful. Let the artist keep his private life long enough out of his work--let him, like Keats, hardly make any allusion in his poetry to his most absorbing passion--and no work will have such life, such colour, such divine fire as that executed whilst he not only wrought, but lived and suffered. Neither the precariousness of Keats's circumstances, nor his hopeless state of health, nor his passion for Fanny Brawne, set any distinct mark on his poetry; but from all this poison for himself he drew nourishment for it. He sank into his early grave, but hardly had the earth closed over him before he rose again from the dead in Shelley's great elegy. He ceased to exist as Keats; he was transformed into a myth, into Adonais, into the beloved of all the Muses and the elements; and henceforward he had, as it were, a double existence in the consciousness of the age. "He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he; Mourn not for Adonais.... He is made one with Nature. There is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird.... He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely. He doth bear His part, while the One Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there All new successions to the forms they wear.... The inheritors of unfulfilled renown Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought, Far in the unapparent. Chatterton Rose pale, his solemn agony had not Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought, And as he fell, and as he lived and loved, Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot, Arose . . . . . . . . . . . . And many more, whose names on earth are dark, But whose transmitted effluence cannot die So long as fire outlives the parent spark, Rose, robed in dazzling immortality. 'Thou art become as one of us,' they cry; 'It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long Swung blind in unascended majesty, Silent alone amid an heaven of song. Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!'"[3] We search the history of literature in vain for a parallel to this elegy. It is instant transfiguration after death--a poetic transfiguration of a purely naturalistic and purely human kind. To Shelley, Keats's true apotheosis was what he expresses in the words: "He is made one with Nature." [1] "Death, the immortalising winter, flew Athwart the stream--and time's printless torrent grew A scroll of crystal, blazoning the name Of Adonais" --_Fragment on Keats_: Shelley. [2] Note the melodiousness of the Fairy Song: