Buried in Rome.
Keats died in 1821. In that year Shelley was living between Lirici, on the gulf of Spezia, and Pisa. While in this latter city, he was planted for a time at the old Lanfranchi palace, where in the following season very much at the instance and urgence of Shelley, Leigh Hunt came with his six riotous young children, and sometimes made a din—that was new to Byron and most worrisome—in the court of the Lanfranchi house. Out of this Hunt fraternizing and co-working (forecast by the kindly Shelley) was to be built up the success of that famous “Liberal” Journal, dear to the hearts of Shelley and Hunt, of which I have already spoken, and which had disastrous failure; out of this aggregation of disorderly poetic elements grew also the squabbles that gave such harsh color to the Reminiscences of Leigh Hunt.[77]
But other and graver disaster was impending. Shelley loved the sea, and carried with him to the water the same reckless daring which he put into his verse. Upon a summer day of July, 1822, he went with a friend and one boatman for a sail upon the bay of Spezia, not heeding some cautions that had been dropped by old seamen, who had seen portents of a storm; and his boat sailed away into the covert of the clouds. Next day there were no tidings, nor the next, nor the next. Finally wreck and bodies came to the shore.
Trelawney, Byron’s friend, tells a grim story of it all—how the dismal truth was carried to the widowed wife, how the body of the drowned poet was burned upon the shore, with heathen libations of oil and wine; how Byron and Hunt both were present at the weird funeral—the blue Mediterranean lapping peacefully upon the beach and the black smoke lifting in great clouds from the pyre and throwing lurid shadows over the silent company. The burial—such as there was of it—took place in that same Protestant graveyard at Rome—just out of the Porta San Paolo—where we were just now witnesses at the burial of Keats.
Shelley made many friendships, and lasting ones. He was wonderfully generous; he visited the sick; he helped the needy; putting himself often into grievous straits for means to give quickly. As he was fine of figure and of feature, so his voice was fine, delicate, penetrative, yet in moments of great excitement rising to a shrillness that spoiled melody and rasped the ear; so his finer generosities and kindnesses sometimes passed into a rasping indifference or even cruelty toward those nearest him, he feeling that first Westbrook mesalliance, on occasions, like a torture—specially when the presence of the tyrannic, coarse, aggravating sister-in-law was like a poisonous irritant; he—under the teachings of a conscientious father, in his young days—was scarce more than half responsible for his wry life; running to badnesses—on occasions—under good impulses; perhaps marrying that first wife because she wanted to marry him; and quitting her—well—because “she didn’t care.” Intellectually, as well as morally, he was pagan; seeing things in their simplest aspects, and so dealing with them; intense, passionate, borne away in tempests of quick decision, whose grounds he cannot fathom; always beating his wings against the cagements that hem us in; eager to look into those depths where light is blinding and will not let us look; seeming at times to measure by some sudden reach of soul what is immeasurable; but under the vain uplifts, always reverent, with a dim hope shining fitfully; contemptuous of harassing creeds or any jugglery of forms—of whatever splendid fashionings of mere material, whether robes or rites—and yearning to solve by some strong, swift flight of imagination what is insoluble. There are many reverent steps that go to that little Protestant cemetery—an English greenery upon the borders of the Roman Campagna—where the ashes of Shelley rest and where myrtles grow. And from its neighborhood, between Mount Aventine and the Janiculan heights, one may see reaches of the gleaming Tiber, and the great dome of St. Peter’s lifting against the northern sky, like another tomb, its cross almost hidden in the gray distance.