He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely, _etc_.

What desolation can it be that discerns comfort in this hope, whose wan
countenance is as the countenance of a despair? What deepest depth of
agony is it that finds consolation in this immortality: an immortality
which thrusts you into death, the maw of Nature, that your dissolved
elements may circulate through her veins?

Yet such, the poet tells me, is my sole balm for the hurts of life. I am
as the vocal breath floating from an organ. I too shall fade on the
winds, a cadence soon forgotten. So I dissolve and die, and am lost in
the ears of men: the particles of my being twine in newer melodies, and
from my one death arise a hundred lives. Why, through the thin partition
of this consolation Pantheism can hear the groans of its neighbour,
Pessimism. Better almost the black resignation which the fatalist draws
from his own hopelessness, from the fierce kisses of misery that hiss
against his tears.

With some gleams, it is true, of more than mock solace, _Adonais_ is
lighted; but they are obtained by implicitly assuming the personal
immortality which the poem explicitly denies; as when, for instance, to
greet the dead youth,

The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought
Far in the unapparent.

And again the final stanza of the poem: