He now bursts forth afresh into the music of consolation:-- Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep! He hath awakened from the dream of life.
'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings.

WE decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
He has outsoared the shadow of our night; Envy and calumny, and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain; Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn, With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he; Mourn not for Adonais .-- Thou young Dawn, Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee The spirit thou lamentest is not gone; Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan! Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair! 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felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own; Which wields the world with never wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.
He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear His part, while the One Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there All new successions to the forms they wear; Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight To its own likeness, as each mass may bear; And bursting in its beauty and its might From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.
But the absorption of the human soul into primeval nature-forces, the blending of the principle of thought with the universal spirit of beauty, is not enough to satisfy man's yearning after immortality.
Therefore in the next three stanzas the indestructibility of the personal self is presented to us, as the soul of Adonais passes into the company of the illustrious dead who, like him, were untimely slain:-- The splendours of the firmament of time May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not: Like stars to their appointed height they climb, And death is a low mist which cannot blot The brightness it may veil.

When lofty thought Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, And love and life contend in it, for what Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there, And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought, Far in the Unapparent.

Chatterton Rose pale, his solemn agony had not Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought And as he fell, and as he lived and loved, Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot, Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:-- Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.
And many more, whose names on Earth are dark, But whose transmitted effluence cannot die So long as fire outlives the parent spark, Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
"Thou art become as one of us," they cry; "It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long Swung blind in unascended majesty, Silent alone amid an Heaven of song.
Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!" From the more universal and philosophical aspects of his theme, the poet once more turns to the special subject that had stirred him.

Adonais lies dead; and those who mourn him must seek his grave.