Death of A Hero

We spoke once in class about heroes and the image that we typically create about our personal heroes. I couldn't help but think about that discussion while reading Shelley's To Wordsworth. It is clear that Shelley looked up to Wordsworth and felt that they were cut from the same cloth. I can't imagine the grief and desertion he must have felt at Wordsworth's later swing to conservatism. To Shelley it must have seemed a complete betrayal to all that Wordsworth once held dear.
Shelley speaks of Wordsworth as though in death, that he should "cease to be." Don't we often feel that way when our perspective is shattered, when the foundation for our ideals is ripped from us and we are left to pick up the pieces that remain? Shelley's words show us a glimpse of the acute grief that must accompany the death of a hero.
Similarly in Ozymandias, Shelley is telling the tale of a man once great, but now reduced to nothing more than ruble and remains. I don't get the feeling of grief from this poem so much as acceptance of the inevitable. He focuses on the fact that though the man no longer remains the passions and politics of him live on beyond the grave. The "wrinkled lip" and the "sneer of cold command." Couldn't those very thoughts be applied to many great and terrible men from history? I still wonder why he speaks of it in third person. It's almost as though he is distancing himself from the reality of what remains.