United States or Afghanistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Cor Cordium were the words inscribed by his widow on the tomb of the poet. The character of Shelley has been sadly maligned. Whatever faults he may have committed against society, they were not the result of sensuality. One of his biographers, who was his companion at Oxford, and who does not seem inclined to do him more than justice, asserts that while there his conduct was immaculate.
But the woods are the pride and beauty of the country; there the palm, the cocoa-nut, the mountain cabbage, and the plantain are often associated with the tamarind and orange, the oleander and African rose growing in rich luxuriance, the scarlet cordium of a glowing red, the jasmine and grenadilla vine forming verdant bowers, the lilac with tufted plumes, the portlandia with white and silky leaves, together with an infinite variety of flower and fruit bearing shrubs.
It was very beautiful and tasteful in every way; the names upon the stones were chiefly English and Scotch, with here and there an American's. But affection drew us only to the prostrate tablet inscribed with the words, "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor Cordium," and then we were ready to go to the grave of him for whom we all feel so deep a tenderness.
Now you know all that I can tell you, and I here lay the past in a sepulchre, and roll the stone upon it, and henceforth I trust you will respect the dead; at least, let silence rest upon its ashes. Hic jacet cor cordium." Salome extricated herself from the arms of her best friend, and smoothed the hair that constant strokes had somewhat disordered. "Salome, I can not live much longer."
The memory of that day described by Trelawny in a passage of immortal English prose, when he and Byron and Leigh Hunt stood beside the funeral pyre, and libations were poured, and the Cor Cordium was found inviolate among the ashes, turned all my thoughts to flame beneath the gentle autumn sky.
His ashes were carried by Trelawny to Rome and buried in the Protestant cemetery, so touchingly described by him in his letter to Peacock, and afterwards so sublimely in "Adonais". The epitaph, composed by Hunt, ran thus: "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor Cordium, Natus iv. August MDCCXCII. Obiit VIII Jul.
When I think of the self-devotion which the human heart can contain of those saintly souls that are in love with sorrow, and that yearn to shelter all weakness and all grief it inspires an unspeakable confidence that there must also be an instinct of parentage beyond this human race, a heart of hearts, cor cordium. As we all crave something to protect, so we long to feel ourselves protected.
The beautifully polished pillars were fluted, and wreathed with carved ivy that wound up to the richly-sculptured cornices, where poppies clustered and tossed their leaves along the architrave; and, in the centre, visible through all the arches, rose an altar, bearing two angels with fingers on their lips, who guarded an exquisite urn that was inscribed "cor cordium."
A little hedge of rose and bay surrounds his grave, which bears the simple inscription "PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY; Cor Cordium." "Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange." Glorious, but misguided Shelley!
So purely ideal and so deeply human are the visions of Shelley. So truly does he deserve the epitaph which a clear-sighted friend wrote upon his tomb: cor cordium, the heart of hearts. Address delivered before the Philosophical Union of the University of California, August 25, 1911.
Word Of The Day