This formlessness, this monotony of splendour, is felt even in 'Adonais' (1821), his elegy on the death of Keats. John Keats was a very different person from Shelley. The son of a livery-stable keeper, he had been an apothecary's apprentice, and for a short time had walked the hospitals. He was driven into literature by sheer artistic passion, and not at all from any craving to ameliorate the world. His odes are among the chief glories of the English language. His life, unlike Shelley's, was devoted entirely to art, and was uneventful, its only incidents an unhappy love-affair, and the growth, hastened by disappointed passion and the 'Quarterly Review's' contemptuous attack on his work, of the consumption which killed him at the age of twenty-six. He was sent to Italy as a last chance. Shelley, who was then at Pisa, proposed to nurse him back to health, and offered him shelter. Keats refused the invitation, and died at Rome on February 23, 1821. Shelley was not intimate with Keats, and had been slow to recognise his genius; but it was enough that he was a poet, in sympathy with the Radicals, an exile, and the victim of the Tory reviewers. There is not ill Adonais that note of personal bereavement which wails through Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' or Cowley's 'Ode on the Death of Mr. Hervey'. Much, especially in the earlier stanzas, is common form. The Muse Urania is summoned to lament, and a host of personified abstractions flit before us, "like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream"-- "Desires and Adorations, Winged Persuasions, and veiled Destinies, Splendours and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations Of Hopes and Fears, and twilight Fantasies." At first he scarcely seems to know what it is that he wants to say, but as he proceeds he warms to his work. The poets gather round Adonais' bier, and in four admirable stanzas Shelley describes himself as "a phantom among men," who "Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, Actaeon-like; and now he fled astray With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, And his own thoughts along that rugged way Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey." The Quarterly Reviewer is next chastised, and at last Shelley has found his cue. The strain rises from thoughts of mortality to the consolations of the eternal: "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." Keats is made "one with Nature"; he is a parce of that power "Which wields the world with never wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above."