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; Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight To its own likeness, as each mass may bear; And bursting in its beauty and its might From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light. But the absorption of the human soul into primeval nature-forces, the blending of the principle of thought with the universal spirit of beauty, is not enough to satisfy man's yearning after immortality. Therefore in the next three stanzas the indestructibility of the personal self is presented to us, as the soul of Adonais passes into the company of the illustrious dead who, like him, were untimely slain:-- The splendours of the firmament of time May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not: Like stars to their appointed height they climb, And death is a low mist which cannot blot The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, And love and life contend in it, for what Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there, And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air. 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 Lucan, by his death approved:-- Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved. 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!" From the more universal and philosophical aspects of his theme, the poet once more turns to the special subject that had stirred him. Adonais lies dead; and those who mourn him must seek his grave. He has escaped: to follow him is to die; and where should we learn to dote on death unterrified, if not in Rome? In this way the description of Keat's resting-place beneath the pyramid of Cestius, which was also destined to be Shelley's own, is introduced:--