For he is gone where all things wise and fair descend.
So much for the sense of shining and resplendent peace that comes with the going of so large a spirit! But let us read on. It is Urania now who is addressed concerning the poet:—
Thy youngest dearest one has perished; thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last. The bloom whose petals, nipt before they blew, died in the promise of the fruit, is waste; the broken lily lies—the storm is overpast. The quick Dreams, the passion-winged ministers of thought, who were his flocks, whom near the living streams of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught the love which was its music, wander not, wander no more.... And one with trembling hand clasps his cold head, and fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries: 'Our love, our hope, our sorrow is not dead; see on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies a tear some Dream has loosened from his brain.' ... And others came,—Desires and Adorations, Winged Persuasions, and Veiled Destinies, Splendors and Glooms and glimmering Incarnations of hopes and fears and twilight Phantasies ... all he had loved and moulded into thought from shape, and hue and odor and sweet sound, lamented Adonaïs.... He is made one with Nature; there is heard his voice in all her music, from the moan of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird; he is a presence to be felt and known in darkness and in light, from herb and stone, spreading itself where'er that Power may move which has withdrawn his being to its own; ... he is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely; ... he is gathered to the kings of thoughts who waged contention with their times' decay, and of the past are all that cannot pass away.
And this further, this little bit about the poet's grave:—
Here pause, these graves are all too young as yet, to have outgrown the sorrow which consigned its charge to each; and if the seal is set, here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, break it not thou!... From the world's bitter wind seek shelter in the shadows of the tomb. What Adonaïs is, why fear we to become?
It will be objected that this is not biography at all, but poetry, and very famous poetry at that. I am aware, full aware of it. I have only to remark that, since there is a beating upon the gates and the starved people demand bread and there is none, 'Why then, let them eat cake!' There is perhaps more pure essence of biography in lines like these, which purport not to be biography at all, than in any pompous three-volume 'Life,' which comes decked in scarlet, and heralded by the trumpet-blasts of publishers well versed in the psychology of advertising.
Or take all these supreme lines away and leave me but that one by the same hand, 'The soul of Adonaïs like a star,' and I am not sure that I am not richer by that, than by many biographical chapters.
II
It has always seemed to me that the best possible biographer, even including the immortal Boswell, would have been Horatio. Ophelia might have been better still had she kept her poor senses. Even having lost them, she seems to do no less than draw back a shimmering veil from the soul and life of Hamlet in the few remarks she makes concerning him: 'Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?'