He was fond of yachting, and spent
much of his time upon the Mediterranean. In the summer of 1822 his boat
was swamped in a squall, off the Gulf of Spezzia, and Shelley's drowned
body was washed ashore, and burned in the presence of Byron and Leigh
Hunt. The ashes were entombed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, with
the epitaph, _Cor cordium_.
Shelley's best and maturest work, nearly all of which was done in Italy,
includes his tragedy, _The Cenci_, 1819, and his lyrical drama,
_Prometheus Unbound_, 1821. The first of these has a unity and a
definiteness of contour unusual with Shelley, and is, with the exception
of some of Robert Browning's, the best English tragedy since Otway.
Prometheus represented to Shelley's mind the human spirit fighting
against divine oppression, and in his portrayal of this figure he kept
in mind not only the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus, but the Satan of
_Paradise Lost_. Indeed, in this poem, Shelley came nearer to the
sublime than any English poet since Milton. Yet it is in lyrical, rather
than in dramatic, quality that _Prometheus Unbound_ is great. If Shelley
be not, as his latest editor, Mr. Forman, claims him to be, the foremost
of English lyrical poets, he is at least the most lyrical of them. He
had, in a supreme degree, the "lyric cry.
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