*Mary Shelley.
The ideas of the Revolution touched him as they had touched Byron
and Wordsworth, and although Wordsworth turned away from them
disappointed, Shelley held on hopefully.
"To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates:
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory!"*
*Prometheus Unbound.
One of Shelley's last poems was an elegy called Adonais. Under
the name of Adonais, he mourns for the death of another poet,
John Keats, who died at twenty-six. Shelley believed when he
wrote the poem that Keats had been done to death by the cruel
criticisms of his poems, that he had died of a broken heart,
because the world neither understood nor sympathized with his
poetry.
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