'He is made one with Nature; there is heard
His voice in all her music.'—
Shelley

There be more things within that far-off breast,
Whereon the flowers grow
Of the boy poet, in his Roman rest,
Than hearts like ours can know.
He slumbers, but his sleep hath not our fears,
For all aside is thrown;
And from the gateway of his tombèd years
A power is moving on.
And in that power is hid a voice that speaks
To hearts that throb and rise
From common earth, and worship that which seeks
The wider sympathies.
For he is silent not; and from the bounds
Wherein his footsteps move
Come, like the winds at morn, all summer sounds
Of boyhood thought and love.
So he to us is as an oracle
Whose words bedrip with youth;
The latest spirit, bathing in the well
Of Pagan shape and truth.
A passionate existence which we scan;
But first must lay aside
The rougher thinking that belongs to man,
And take the unsettled pride
Of eager youth and fancy, and a strength
Misled by the fond zeal;
For Grecian look and light yet found at length
The power to touch and feel.
So, taking this into thy thought, you trace
His wealth of opening lore;
He bursts upon you with his freshest grace,
And moves a man no more—
But a bright shadow in the heart's expanse,
Crown'd with the tenderest rays
Of love, and thought as of the far-off glance
Of early summer days.
So bring him from beneath the sky of Rome,
From all her youngest flowers.
I weep that there his dust should find a home,
And all his spirit ours!
But no, you cannot; for a bond he keeps
Whose ties are firmly strung—
The lone yet passionate heart of Shelley sleeps
Beside the dust he sung.
And it were vain to leave him there and foil
His rest—so let them sleep
Within the silence of that glorious soil,
Whose inspirations steep
Their songs in colours like the summer boughs—
Whose freshness ever strives
And blooms, like asphodels, upon the brows
Of two immortal lives.
And there they sleep, as if their fates had said
They shall not sleep alone;
The singer and the sung must fill one bed,
And make their ashes one.
It is so; and through the quick years that roll,
That sepulchre of theirs
Is as a passionate and wish'd-for goal
To which all thought repairs—
While in our hearts, as is their dust at Rome,
Their spirits feel no wrong;
But shine to us like gods serenely from
The Pantheon of Song.