To my dearest, dearest friend, Lynette. After a long long absence, I was thinking of you, just today, hoping to be in touch with you, and then -- I just heard the news and I miss you very much and send all the most wondrous thoughts and memories your way -- I add some verses for you, from Shelley, because we used to read such poems together, over two decades ago, you and I, after long whole-afternoon-until-early-evening walks on Port Meadow, stopping to drag our feet in the water or to meditate at the river side, watching the shadows and light fluctuate in the ripples, or after a visit to the art galleries. So -- whichever plain you are now on, look down on us, kindly, dear friend -- Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,       He hath awaken'd 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 outsoar'd 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 gray in vain;       Nor, when the spirit's self has ceas'd 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 abandon'd 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     In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,       Spreading itself where'er that Power may move       Which has withdrawn his being to its own;       Which wields the world with never-wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.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.       The splendours of the firmament of time       May be eclips'd, but are extinguish'd 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.