His last
published letter--written July 5th, 1822--after they had settled at Pisa,
is full of forebodings. On the 8th he set sail in the "Don Juan"--
That fatal and perfidious bark,
Built in th'eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark,
and was overtaken by the storm in which he perished. Three days after,
Trelawny rode to Pisa, and told Byron of his fears, when the poet's lips
quivered, and his voice faltered. On the 22nd of July the bodies of
Shelley, Williams, and Vivian, were cast ashore. On the 16th August, Hunt,
Byron, and Trelawny were present at the terribly weird cremation, which
they have all described. At a later date, the two former were seized with
a fit of delirium which is one of the phases of the tension of grief.
Byron's references to the event are expressions less of the loss which he
indubitably felt, than of his indignation at the "world's wrong." "Thus,"
he writes, "there is another man gone, about whom the world was
ill-naturedly and ignorantly and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do
him justice now, when he can be no better for it." Towards the end of the
same letter the spirit of his dead friend seems to inspire the sentence
--"With these things and these fellows it is necessary, in the present
clash of philosophy and tyranny, to throw away the scabbard.
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