His head was bound with pansies over-blown, And faded violets, white and pied and blue; And a light spear topped with a cypress cone, Round whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew Yet dripping with the forest's noon-day dew, Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart Shook the weak hand that grasped it. Of that crew He came the last, neglected and apart; A herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter's dart. The second passage is the peroration of the poem. Nowhere has Shelley expressed his philosophy of man's relation to the universe with more sublimity and with a more imperial command of language than in these stanzas. If it were possible to identify that philosophy with any recognized system of thought, it might be called pantheism. But it is difficult to affix a name, stereotyped by the usage of the schools, to the aerial spiritualism of its ardent and impassioned poet's creed. The movement of the long melodious sorrow-song has just been interrupted by three stanzas, in which Shelley lashes the reviewer of Keats. He now bursts forth afresh into the music of consolation:-- Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep! He hath awakened from the dream of life. 'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings. WE decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. He has outsoared the shadow of our night; Envy and calumny, and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain; Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn, With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he; Mourn not for Adonais.--Thou young Dawn, Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee The spirit thou lamentest is not gone; Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan! Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair! 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 presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own; Which wields the world with never wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.