On 8 July
1822, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley died in the
Tyrrhenian Sea. He was sailing back from Livorno, where he had met with Leigh
Hunt, who had come from England to help with the publication of a radical
journal, "The Liberal", to which Byron was also going to contribute.
It is likely that an unexpected storm took Shelley by surprise, together with
his friend Edward Williams and a boatboy, none of whom were particularly
experienced in navigation. When Shelley's body was washed ashore and found
on the beach at Viareggio, it was cremated following a quarantine, and his
ashes buried at the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome. On his gravestone there
is a Latin inscription "Cor Cordium", Heart of Hearts, and a passage
from Ariel's song in The Tempest, a reference to the circumstances
of his death:
"Nothing
of him that doth fade,
But doth
suffer a sea-change
Into
something rich and strange."
