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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10119 ***
+
+ADONAIS
+
+by
+
+SHELLEY
+
+edited
+
+With Introduction and Notes
+
+by WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI
+
+1891
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+PREFACE
+MEMOIR OF SHELLEY
+MEMOIR OF KEATS
+ADONAIS:
+ITS COMPOSITION AND BIBLIOGRAPHY ITS ARGUMENT GENERAL EXPOSITION
+BION AND MOSCHUS
+ADONAIS: PREFACE
+ADONAIS
+CANCELLED PASSAGES OF ADONAIS AND ITS PREFACE
+NOTES
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+_Adonais_ is the first writing by Shelley which has been included in the
+_Clarendon Press Series_. It is a poem of convenient length for such a
+purpose, being neither short nor decidedly long; and--leaving out of
+count some of the short poems--is the one by this author which
+approaches nearest to being 'popular.' It is elevated in sentiment,
+classical in form,--in substance, biographical in relation to Keats, and
+in some minor degree autobiographical for Shelley himself. On these
+grounds it claimed a reasonable preference over all his other poems, for
+the present method of treatment; although some students of Shelley,
+myself included, might be disposed to maintain that, in point of
+absolute intrinsic beauty and achievement, and of the qualities most
+especially characteristic of its author, it is not superior, or indeed
+is but barely equal, to some of his other compositions. To take, for
+instance, two poems not very different in length from _Adonais_--_The
+Witch of Atlas_ is more original, and _Epipsychidion_ more abstract in
+ideal.
+
+I have endeavoured to present in my introductory matter a comprehensive
+account of all particulars relevant to _Adonais_ itself, and to Keats as
+its subject, and Shelley as its author. The accounts here given of both
+these great poets are of course meagre, but I assume them to be not
+insufficient for our immediate and restricted purpose. There are many
+other books which the reader can profitably consult as to the life and
+works of Shelley; and three or four (at least) as to the life and works
+of Keats. My concluding notes are, I suppose, ample in scale: if they
+are excessive, that is an involuntary error on my part. My aim in them
+has been to illustrate and elucidate the poem in its details, yet
+without travelling far afield in search of remote analogies or
+discursive comment--my wish being rather to 'stick to my text': wherever
+a difficulty presents itself, I have essayed to define it, and clear it
+up--but not always to my own satisfaction. I have seldom had to discuss
+the opinions of previous writers on the same points, for the simple
+reason that of detailed criticism of _Adonais_, apart from merely
+textual memoranda, there is next to none.
+
+It has appeared to me to be part of my duty to point out here and there,
+but by no means frequently, some special beauty in the poem;
+occasionally also something which seems to me defective or faulty. I am
+aware that this latter is an invidious office, which naturally exposes
+one to an imputation, from some quarters, of obtuseness, and, from
+others, of presumption; none the less I have expressed myself with the
+frankness which, according to my own view, belongs to the essence of
+such a task as is here undertaken. _Adonais_ is a composition which has
+retorted beforehand upon its actual or possible detractors. In the poem
+itself, and in the prefatory matter adjoined to it, Shelley takes
+critics very severely to task: but criticism has its discerning and
+temperate, as well as its 'stupid and malignant' phases.
+
+W.M. ROSSETTI.
+
+_July, 1890._
+
+
+
+
+MEMOIR OF SHELLEY.
+
+
+The life of Percy Bysshe Shelley is one which has given rise to a great
+deal of controversy, and which cannot, for a long time to come, fail to
+be regarded with very diverse sentiments. His extreme opinions on
+questions of religion and morals, and the great latitude which he
+allowed himself in acting according to his own opinions, however widely
+they might depart from the law of the land and of society, could not but
+produce this result. In his own time he was generally accounted an
+outrageous and shameful offender. At the present date many persons
+entertain essentially the same view, although softened by lapse of
+years, and by respect for his standing as a poet: others regard him as a
+conspicuous reformer. Some take a medium course, and consider him to
+have been sincere, and so far laudable; but rash and reckless of
+consequences, and so far censurable. His poetry also has been subject to
+very different constructions. During his lifetime it obtained little
+notice save for purposes of disparagement and denunciation. Now it is
+viewed with extreme enthusiasm by many, and is generally admitted to
+hold a permanent rank in English literature, though faulty (as some
+opine) through vague idealism and want of backbone. These are all points
+on which I shall here offer no personal opinion. I shall confine myself
+to tracing the chief outlines of Shelley's life, and (very briefly) the
+sequence of his literary work.
+
+Percy Bysshe Shelley came of a junior and comparatively undistinguished
+branch of a very old and noted family. His branch was termed the
+Worminghurst Shelleys; and it is only quite lately[1] that the
+affiliation of this branch to the more eminent and senior stock of the
+Michelgrove Shelleys has passed from the condition of a probable and
+obvious surmise into that of an established fact. The family traces up
+to Sir William Shelley, Judge of the Common Pleas under Henry VII,
+thence to a Member of Parliament in 1415, and to the reign of Edward I,
+or even to the Norman Conquest. The Worminghurst Shelleys start with
+Henry Shelley, who died in 1623. It will be sufficient here to begin
+with the poet's grandfather, Bysshe Shelley. He was born at Christ
+Church, Newark, North America, and raised to a noticeable height,
+chiefly by two wealthy marriages, the fortunes of the junior branch.
+Handsome, keen-minded, and adventurous, he eloped with Mary Catherine,
+heiress of the Rev. Theobald Michell, of Horsham; after her death he
+eloped with Elizabeth Jane, heiress of Mr. Perry, of Penshurst. By this
+second wife he had a family, now represented, by the Baron de l'Isle and
+Dudley: by his first wife he had (besides a daughter) a son Timothy, who
+was the poet's father, and who became in due course Sir Timothy Shelley,
+Bart., M.P. His baronetcy was inherited from his father Bysshe--on whom
+it had been conferred, in 1806, chiefly through the interest of the Duke
+of Norfolk, the head of the Whig party in the county of Sussex, to whose
+politics the new baronet had adhered.
+
+Mr. Timothy Shelley was a very ordinary country gentleman in essentials,
+and a rather eccentric one in some details. He was settled at Field
+Place, near Horsham, Sussex, and married Elizabeth, daughter of Charles
+Pilfold, of Effingham, Surrey; she was a beauty, and a woman of good
+abilities, but without any literary turn. Their first child was the
+poet, Percy Bysshe, born at Field Place on Aug. 4, 1792: four daughters
+also grew up, and a younger son, John: the eldest son of John is now the
+Baronet, having succeeded, in 1889, Sir Percy Florence Shelley, the
+poet's only surviving son. No one has managed to discover in the parents
+of Percy Bysshe any qualities furnishing the prototype or the nucleus of
+his poetical genius, or of the very exceptional cast of mind and
+character which he developed in other directions. The parents were
+commonplace: if we go back to the grandfather, Sir Bysshe, we encounter
+a man who was certainly not commonplace, but who seems to have been
+devoid of either poetical or humanitarian fervour. He figures as intent
+upon his worldly interests, accumulating a massive fortune, and spending
+lavishly upon the building of Castle Goring; in his old age, penurious,
+unsocial, and almost churlish in his habits. His passion was to domineer
+and carry his point; of this the poet may have inherited something. His
+ideal of success was wealth and worldly position, things to which the
+poet was, on the contrary, abnormally indifferent.
+
+Shelley's schooling began at six years of age, when he was placed under
+the Rev. Mr. Edwards, at Warnham. At ten he went to Sion House School,
+Brentford, of which the Principal was Dr. Greenlaw, the pupils being
+mostly sons of local tradesmen. In July, 1804, he proceeded to Eton,
+where Dr. Goodall was the Head Master, succeeded, just towards the end
+of Shelley's stay, by the far severer Dr. Keate. Shelley was shy,
+sensitive, and of susceptible fancy: at Eton we first find him
+insubordinate as well. He steadily resisted the fagging-system, learned
+more as he chose than as his masters dictated, and was known as 'Mad
+Shelley,' and 'Shelley the Atheist.' It has sometimes been said that an
+Eton boy, if rebellious, was termed 'Atheist,' and that the designation,
+as applied to Shelley, meant no more than that. I do not feel satisfied
+that this is true at all; at any rate it seems to me probable that
+Shelley, who constantly called himself an atheist in after-life,
+received the epithet at Eton for some cause more apposite than
+disaffection to school-authority.
+
+He finally left Eton in July, 1810. He had already been entered in
+University College, Oxford, in April of that year, and he commenced
+residence there in October. His one very intimate friend in Oxford was
+Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a student from the county of Durham. Hogg was
+not, like Shelley, an enthusiast eager to learn new truths, and to apply
+them; but he was a youth appreciative of classical and other literature,
+and little or not at all less disposed than Percy to disregard all
+prescription in religious dogma. By demeanour and act they both courted
+academic censure, and they got it in its extremest form. Shelley wrote,
+probably with some co-operation from Hogg, and he published anonymously
+in Oxford, a little pamphlet called _The Necessity of Atheism_; he
+projected sending it round broadcast as an invitation or challenge to
+discussion. This small pamphlet--it is scarcely more than a
+flysheet--hardly amounts to saying that Atheism is irrefragably true,
+and Theism therefore false; but it propounds that the existence of a God
+cannot be proved by reason, nor yet by testimony; that a direct
+revelation made to an individual would alone be adequate ground for
+convincing that individual; and that the persons to whom such a
+revelation is not accorded are in consequence warranted in remaining
+unconvinced. The College authorities got wind of the pamphlet, and found
+reason for regarding Shelley as its author, and on March 25, 1811, they
+summoned him to appear. He was required to say whether he had written it
+or not. To this demand he refused an answer, and was then expelled by a
+written sentence, ready drawn up. With Hogg the like process was
+repeated. Their offence, as entered on the College records, was that of
+'contumaciously refusing to answer questions,' and 'repeatedly declining
+to disavow' the authorship of the work. In strictness therefore they
+were expelled, not for being proclaimed atheists, but for defying
+academic authority, which required to be satisfied as to that question.
+Shortly before this disaster an engagement between Shelley and his first
+cousin on the mother's side, Miss Harriet Grove, had come to an end,
+owing to the alarm excited by the youth's sceptical opinions.
+
+Settling in lodgings in London, and parting from Hogg, who went to York
+to study conveyancing, Percy pretty soon found a substitute for Harriet
+Grove in Harriet Westbrook, a girl of fifteen, schoolfellow of two of
+his sisters at Clapham. She was exceedingly pretty, daughter of a
+retired hotel-keeper in easy circumstances. Shelley wanted to talk both
+her and his sisters out of Christianity; and he cultivated the
+acquaintance of herself and of her much less juvenile sister Eliza,
+calling from time to time at their father's house in Chapel Street,
+Grosvenor Square. Harriet fell in love with him: besides, he was a
+highly eligible _parti_, being a prospective baronet, absolute heir to a
+very considerable estate, and contingent heir (if he had assented to a
+proposal of entail, to which however he never did assent, professing
+conscientious objections) to another estate still larger. Shelley was
+not in love with Harriet; but he liked her, and was willing to do
+anything he could to further her wishes and plans. Mr. Timothy Shelley,
+after a while, pardoned his son's misadventure at Oxford, and made him a
+moderate allowance of £200 a-year. Percy then visited a cousin in Wales,
+a member of the Grove family. He was recalled to London by Harriet
+Westbrook, who protested against a project of sending her back to
+school. He counselled resistance. She replied in July 1811 (to quote a
+contemporary letter from Shelley to Hogg), 'that resistance was useless,
+but that she would fly with me, and threw herself upon my protection.'
+This was clearly a rather decided step upon the damsel's part: we may
+form our own conclusions whether she was willing to unite with Percy
+without the bond of marriage; or whether she confidently calculated upon
+inducing him to marry her, her family being kept in the dark; or whether
+the whole affair was a family manoeuvre for forcing on an engagement and
+a wedding. Shelley returned to London, and had various colloquies with
+Harriet: in due course he eloped with her to Edinburgh, and there on
+28th August he married her. His age was then just nineteen, and hers
+sixteen. Shelley, who was a profound believer in William Godwin's
+_Political Justice_, rejected the institution of marriage as being
+fundamentally irrational and wrongful. But he saw that he could not in
+this instance apply his own pet theories without involving in discredit
+and discomfort the woman whose love had been bestowed upon him. Either
+his opinion or her happiness must be sacrificed to what he deemed a
+prejudice of society: he decided rather to sacrifice the former.
+
+For two years, or up to an advanced date in 1813, the married life of
+Shelley and Harriet appears to have been a happy one, so far as their
+mutual relation was concerned; though rambling and scrambling,
+restricted by mediocrity of income (£400 a year, made up between the two
+fathers), and pestered by the continual, and to Percy at last very
+offensive, presence of Miss Westbrook as an inmate of the house. They
+lived in York, Keswick in Cumberland, Dublin (which Shelley visited as
+an express advocate of Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Union),
+Nantgwillt in Radnorshire, Lynmouth in Devonshire, Tanyrallt in
+Carnarvonshire, London, Bracknell in Berkshire: Ireland and Edinburgh
+were also revisited. Various strange adventures befell; the oddest of
+all being an alleged attempt at assassination at Tanyrallt. Shelley
+asserted it, others disbelieved it: after much disputation the
+biographer supposes that, if not an imposture, it was a romance, and, if
+not a romance, at least a hallucination,--Shelley, besides being wild in
+talk and wild in fancy, being by this time much addicted to
+laudanum-dosing. In June 1813 Harriet gave birth, in London, to her
+first child, Ianthe Eliza (she married a Mr. Esdaile, and died in 1876).
+About the same time Shelley brought out his earliest work of importance,
+the poem of _Queen Mab_: its speculative audacities were too extreme for
+publication, so it was only privately printed.
+
+Amiable and accommodating at first, and neither ill-educated nor stupid,
+Harriet did not improve in tone as she advanced in womanhood. Her
+sympathy or tolerance for her husband's ideals and vagaries flagged;
+when they differed she gave him the cold shoulder; she wanted
+luxuries--such as a carriage of her own--which he neither cared for nor
+could properly afford. He even said--and one can hardly accuse him of
+saying it insincerely--that she had been unfaithful to him: this however
+remains quite unproved, and may have been a delusion. He sought the
+society of the philosopher Godwin, then settled as a bookseller in
+Skinner Street, Holborn. Godwin's household at this time consisted of
+his second wife, who had been a Mrs. Clairmont; Mary, his daughter by
+his first wife, the celebrated Mary Wollstonecraft; and his young son by
+his second wife, William; also his step-children, Charles and Clare
+Clairmont, and Fanny Wollstonecraft (or Imlay), the daughter of Mary
+Wollstonecraft by her first irregular union with Gilbert Imlay. Until
+May 1814, when she was getting on towards the age of seventeen, Shelley
+had scarcely set eyes on Mary Godwin: he then saw her, and a sudden
+passion sprang up between them--uncontrollable, or, at any rate,
+uncontrolled. Harriet Shelley has left it on record that the advances
+and importunities came from Mary Godwin to Shelley, and were for a while
+resisted: it was natural for Harriet to allege this, but I should not
+suppose it to be true, unless in a very partial sense. Shelley sent for
+his wife, who had gone for a while to Bath (perhaps in a fit of
+pettishness, but this is not clear), and explained to her in June that
+they must separate--a resolve which she combated as far as seemed
+possible, but finally she returned to Bath, staying there with her
+father and sister. Shelley made some arrangements for her convenience,
+and on the 28th of July he once more eloped, this time with Mary Godwin.
+Clare Clairmont chose to accompany them. Godwin was totally opposed to
+the whole transaction, and Mrs. Godwin even pursued the fugitives across
+the Channel; but her appeal was unavailing, and the youthful and defiant
+trio proceeded in much elation of spirit, and not without a good deal of
+discomfort at times, from Calais to Paris, and thence to Brunen by the
+Lake of Uri in Switzerland. It is a curious fact, and shows how
+differently Shelley regarded these matters from most people, that he
+wrote to Harriet in affectionate terms, urging her to join them there or
+reside hard by them. Mary, before the elopement took place, had made a
+somewhat similar proposal. Harriet had no notion of complying; and, as
+it turned out, the adventurers had no sooner reached Brunen than they
+found their money exhausted, and they travelled back in all haste to
+London in September,--Clare continuing to house with them now, and for
+the most part during the remainder of Shelley's life. Even a poet and
+idealist might have been expected to show a little more worldly wisdom
+than this. After his grievous experiences with Eliza Westbrook, the
+sister of his first wife, Shelley might have managed to steer clear of
+Clare Clairmont, the sister by affinity of his second partner in life.
+He would not take warning, and he paid the forfeit: not indeed that
+Clare was wanting in fine qualities both of mind and of character, but
+she proved a constant source of excitement and uneasiness in the
+household, of unfounded scandal, and of harassing complications.
+
+In London Shelley and Mary lived in great straits, abandoned by almost
+all their acquaintances, and playing hide-and-seek with creditors. But
+in January 1815 Sir Bysshe Shelley died, and Percy's money affairs
+improved greatly. An arrangement was arrived at with his father, whereby
+he received a regular annual income of £1000, out of which he assigned
+to Harriet £200 for herself and her two children--a son, Charles Bysshe,
+having been born in November 1814 (he died in 1826). Shelley and Mary
+next settled at Bishopgate, near Windsor Forest. In May 1816 they went
+abroad, along with Miss Clairmont and their infant son William, and
+joined Lord Byron on the shore of the Lake of Geneva. An amour was
+already going on between Byron and Miss Clairmont; it resulted in the
+birth of a daughter, Allegra, in January 1817; she died in 1822, very
+shortly before Shelley. He and Mary had returned to London in September
+1816. Very shortly afterwards, 9th of November, the ill-starred Harriet
+Shelley drowned herself in the Serpentine: her body was only recovered
+on the 10th of December, and the verdict of the Coroner's Jury was
+'found drowned,' her name being given as 'Harriet Smith.' The career of
+Harriet since her separation from her husband is very indistinctly
+known. It has indeed been asserted in positive terms that she formed
+more than one connexion with other men: she had ceased to live along
+with her father and sister, and is said to have been expelled from their
+house. In these statements I see nothing either unveracious or unlikely:
+but it is true that a sceptical habit of mind, which insists upon
+express evidence and upon severe sifting of evidence, may remain
+unconvinced[2]. This was the second suicide in Shelley's immediate
+circle, for Fanny Wollstonecraft had taken poison just before under
+rather unaccountable circumstances. No doubt he felt dismay and horror,
+and self-reproach as well; yet there is nothing to show that he
+condemned his conduct, at any stage of the transactions with Harriet, as
+heinously wrong. He took the earliest opportunity--30th of December--of
+marrying Mary Godwin; and thus he became reconciled to her father and to
+other members of the family.
+
+It was towards the time of Harriet's suicide that Shelley, staying in
+and near London, became personally intimate with the essayist and poet,
+Leigh Hunt, and through him he came to know John Keats: their first
+meeting appears to have occurred on 5th February, 1817. As this matter
+bears directly upon our immediate theme, the poem of _Adonais_, I deal
+with it at far greater length than its actual importance in the life of
+Shelley would otherwise warrant.
+
+Hunt, in his _Autobiography_, narrates as follows. 'I had not known the
+young poet [Keats] long when Shelley and he became acquainted under my
+roof. Keats did not take to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him.
+Shelley's only thoughts of his new acquaintance were such as regarded
+his bad health with which he sympathised [this about bad health seems
+properly to apply to a date later than the opening period when the two
+poets came together], and his poetry, of which he has left such a
+monument of his admiration as _Adonais_. Keats, being a little too
+sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man
+of birth a sort of natural enemy. Their styles in writing also were very
+different; and Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with
+ordinary flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of
+_Hyperion_, was so far inferior in universality to his great
+acquaintance that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with
+Nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own
+hands [an allusion to the motto appended to _Queen Mab_]. I am bound to
+state thus much; because, hopeless of recovering his health, under
+circumstances that made the feeling extremely bitter, an irritable
+morbidity appears even to have driven his suspicions to excess; and this
+not only with regard to the acquaintance whom he might reasonably
+suppose to have had some advantages over him, but to myself, who had
+none; for I learned the other day with extreme pain ... that Keats, at
+one period of his intercourse with us, suspected both Shelley and myself
+of a wish to see him undervalued! Such are the tricks which constant
+infelicity can play with the most noble natures. For Shelley let
+_Adonais_ answer.' It is to be observed that Hunt is here rather putting
+the cart before the horse. Keats (as we shall see immediately) suspected
+Shelley and Hunt 'of a wish to see him undervalued' as early as February
+1818; but his 'irritable morbidity' when 'hopeless of recovering his
+health' belongs to a later date, say the spring and summer of 1820.
+
+It is said that in the spring of 1817 Shelley and Keats agreed that each
+of them would undertake an epic, to be written in a space of six months:
+Shelley produced _The Revolt of Islam_ (originally entitled _Laon and
+Cythna_), and Keats produced _Endymion_. Shelley's poem, the longer of
+the two, was completed by the early autumn, while Keats's occupied him
+until the winter which opened 1818. On 8th October, 1817, Keats wrote to
+a friend, 'I refused to visit Shelley, that I might have my own
+unfettered scope; meaning presumably that he wished to finish _Endymion_
+according to his own canons of taste and execution, without being
+hampered by any advice from Shelley. There is also a letter from Keats
+to his two brothers, 22nd December, 1817, saying: 'Shelley's poem _Laon
+and Cythna_ is out, and there are words about its being objected to as
+much as _Queen Mab_ was. Poor Shelley, I think he has his quota of good
+qualities.' As late as February 1818 He wrote, 'I have not yet read
+Shelley's poem.' On 23rd January of the same year he had written: 'The
+fact is, he [Hunt] and Shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not
+having showed them the affair [_Endymion_ in MS.] officiously; and, from
+several hints I have had, they appear much disposed to dissect and
+anatomize any trip or slip I may have made.' It was at nearly the same
+date, 4th February, that Keats, Shelley, and Hunt wrote each a sonnet on
+_The Nile_: in my judgment, Shelley's is the least successful of the
+three.
+
+Soon after their marriage, Shelley and his second wife settled at Great
+Marlow, in Buckinghamshire. They were shortly disturbed by a Chancery
+suit, whereby Mr. Westbrook sought to deprive Shelley of the custody of
+his two children by Harriet, Ianthe and Charles. Towards March 1818,
+Lord Chancellor Eldon pronounced judgment against Shelley, on the ground
+of his culpable conduct as a husband, carrying out culpable opinions
+upheld in his writings. The children were handed over to Dr. Hume, an
+army-physician named by Shelley: he had to assign for their support a
+sum of £120 per annum, brought up to £200 by a supplement from Mr.
+Westbrook. About the same date he suffered from an illness which he
+regarded as a dangerous pulmonary attack, and he made up his mind to
+quit England for Italy; accompanied by his wife, their two infants
+William and Clara, Miss Clairmont, and her infant Allegra, who was soon
+afterwards consigned to Lord Byron in Venice. Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke,
+who was Keats's friend from boyhood, writes: 'When Shelley left England
+for Italy, Keats told me that he had received from him an invitation to
+become his guest, and in short to make one of his household. It was upon
+the purest principle that Keats declined his noble proffer, for he
+entertained an exalted opinion of Shelley's genius--in itself an
+inducement. He also knew of his deeds of bounty, and from their frequent
+social intercourse he had full faith in the sincerity of his
+proposal.... Keats said that, in declining the invitation, his sole
+motive was the consciousness, which would be ever prevalent with him, of
+his being, in its utter extent, not a free agent, even within such a
+circle as Shelley's--he himself nevertheless being the most unrestricted
+of beings.' Mr. Clarke seems to mean in this passage that Shelley,
+_before_ starting for Italy, invited Keats to accompany him thither--a
+fact, if such it is, of which I find no trace elsewhere. It is however
+just possible that Clarke was only referring to the earlier invitation,
+previously mentioned, for Keats to visit at Great Marlow; or he may most
+probably, with some confusion as to dates and details, be thinking of
+the message which Shelley, when already settled in Italy for a couple of
+years, addressed to his brother-poet--of which more anon.
+
+Shelley and his family--including for the most part Miss
+Clairmont--wandered about a good deal in Italy. They were in Milan,
+Leghorn, the Bagni di Lucca, Venice and its neighbourhood, Rome, Naples,
+Florence, Pisa, the Bagni di Pisa, and finally (after Shelley had gone
+to Ravenna by himself) in a lonely house named Casa Magni, between
+Lerici and San Terenzio, on the Bay of Spezzia. Their two children died;
+but in 1819 another was born, the Sir Percy Florence Shelley who lived
+on till November 1889. They were often isolated or even solitary. Among
+their interesting acquaintances at one place or another were, besides
+Byron, Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne (the latter had previously been Mrs.
+Reveley, and had been sought in marriage by Godwin after the death of
+Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797); the Contessina Emilia Viviani, celebrated
+in Shelley's poem of _Epipsychidion_; Captain Medwin, Shelley's cousin
+and schoolfellow; the Greek Prince, Alexander Mavrocordato; Lieutenant
+and Mrs. Williams, who joined them at Casa Magni; and Edward John
+Trelawny, an adventurous and daring sea-rover, who afterwards
+accompanied Byron to Greece.
+
+It was only towards the summer of 1819 that Shelley read the _Endymion_.
+He wrote of it thus in a letter to his publisher, Mr. Ollier, September
+6, 1819. 'I have read ... Keats's poem.... Much praise is due to me for
+having read it, the author's intention appearing to be that no person
+should possibly get to the end of it. Yet it is full of some of the
+highest and the finest gleams of poetry: indeed, everything seems to be
+viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. I think, if he
+had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it, I should have been
+led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought--of which there is now
+no danger.' Shelley regarded the Hymn to Pan, in the first Book of
+_Endymion_, as affording 'the surest promise of ultimate excellence.'
+
+The health of Keats having broken down, and consumption having set in,
+Shelley wrote to him from Pisa urging him to come over to Italy as his
+guest. Keats did not however go to Pisa, but, along with the young
+painter Joseph Severn, to Naples, and thence to Rome. I here subjoin
+Shelley's letter.
+
+
+'Pisa--27 July, 1820.
+
+'MY DEAR KEATS,
+
+'I hear with great pain the dangerous accident you have undergone
+[recurrence of blood-spitting from the lungs], and Mr. Gisborne, who
+gives me the account of it, adds that you continue to wear a consumptive
+appearance. This consumption is a disease particularly fond of people
+who write such good verses as you have done, and with the assistance of
+an English winter, it can often indulge its selection. I do not think
+that young and amiable poets are bound to gratify its taste: they have
+entered into no bond with the Muses to that effect. But seriously (for I
+am joking on what I am very anxious about) I think you would do well to
+pass the winter in Italy, and avoid so tremendous an accident; and, if
+you think it as necessary as I do, so long as you continue to find Pisa
+or its neighbourhood agreeable to you, Mrs. Shelley unites with myself
+in urging the request that you would take up your residence with us. You
+might come by sea to Leghorn (France is not worth seeing, and the sea is
+particularly good for weak lungs)--which is within a few miles of us.
+You ought, at all events, to see Italy; and your health, which I suggest
+as a motive, may be an excuse to you. I spare declamation about the
+statues and paintings and ruins, and (what is a greater piece of
+forbearance) about the mountains and streams, the fields, the colours of
+the sky, and the sky itself.
+
+'I have lately read your _Endymion_ again, and even with a new sense of
+the treasures of poetry it contains--though treasures poured forth with
+indistinct profusion. This people in general will not endure; and that
+is the cause of the comparatively few copies which have been sold. I
+feel persuaded that you are capable of the greatest things, so you but
+will. I always tell Ollier to send you copies of my books. _Prometheus
+Unbound_ I imagine you will receive nearly at the same time with this
+letter. _The Cenci_ I hope you have already received: it was studiously
+composed in a different style.
+
+
+"Below the _good_ how far! but far above the _great_[3]!"
+
+
+In poetry I have sought to avoid system and mannerism. I wish those who
+excel me in genius would pursue the same plan.
+
+'Whether you remain in England, or journey to Italy, believe that you
+carry with you my anxious wishes for your health and success--wherever
+you are, or whatever you undertake--and that I am
+
+'Yours sincerely,
+
+'P.B. SHELLEY.'
+
+
+Keats's reply to Shelley ran as follows:--
+
+
+'Hampstead--August 10, 1820.
+
+'MY DEAR SHELLEY,
+
+'I am very much gratified that you, in a foreign country, and with a
+mind almost over-occupied, should write to me in the strain of the
+letter beside me. If I do not take advantage of your invitation, it will
+be prevented by a circumstance I have very much at heart to prophesy[4].
+There is no doubt that an English winter would put an end to me, and do
+so in a lingering hateful manner. Therefore I must either voyage or
+journey to Italy, as a soldier marches up to a battery. My nerves at
+present are the worst part of me: yet they feel soothed that, come what
+extreme may, I shall not be destined to remain in one spot long enough
+to take a hatred of any four particular bedposts.
+
+'I am glad you take any pleasure in my poor poem--which I would
+willingly take the trouble to unwrite if possible, did I care so much as
+I have done about reputation.
+
+'I received a copy of _The Cenci_, as from yourself, from Hunt. There is
+only one part of it I am judge of--the poetry and dramatic effect, which
+by many spirits nowadays is considered the Mammon. A modern work, it is
+said, must have a purpose; which may be the God. An artist must serve
+Mammon: he must have "self-concentration"--selfishness perhaps. You, I
+am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb
+your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your
+subject with ore. The thought of such discipline must fall like cold
+chains upon you, who perhaps never sat with your wings furled for six
+months together. And is not this extraordinary talk for the writer of
+_Endymion_, whose mind was like a pack of scattered cards? I am picked
+up and sorted to a pip. My imagination is a monastery, and I am its
+monk.
+
+'I am in expectation of _Prometheus_ every day. Could I have my own wish
+effected, you would have it still in manuscript, or be but now putting
+an end to the second Act. I remember you advising me not to publish my
+first blights, on Hampstead Heath[5]. I am returning advice upon your
+hands. Most of the poems in the volume I send you [this was the volume
+containing _Lamia, Hyperion_, &c.] have been written above two years[6],
+and would never have been published but for hope of gain: so you see I
+am inclined enough to take your advice now.
+
+'I must express once more my deep sense of your kindness, adding my
+sincere thanks and respects for Mrs. Shelley. In the hope of soon seeing
+you I remain
+
+'Most sincerely yours,
+
+'JOHN KEATS.'
+
+
+It may have been in the interval between writing his note Of invitation
+to Keats, and receiving the reply of the latter, that Shelley penned the
+following letter to the Editor of the _Quarterly Review_--the periodical
+which had taken (or had shared with _Blackwood's Magazine_) the lead in
+depreciating _Endymion_. The letter, however, was left uncompleted, and
+was not dispatched. (I omit such passages as are not directly concerned
+with Keats):--
+
+
+'SIR,
+
+'Should you cast your eye on the signature of this letter before you
+read the contents, you might imagine that they related to a slanderous
+paper which appeared in your Review some time since.... I am not in the
+habit of permitting myself to be disturbed by what is said or written of
+me.... The case is different with the unfortunate subject of this
+letter, the author of _Endymion_, to whose feelings and situation I
+entreat you to allow me to call your attention. I write considerably in
+the dark; but, if it is Mr. Gifford that I am addressing, I am persuaded
+that, in an appeal to his humanity and justice, he will acknowledge the
+_fas ab hoste doceri_. I am aware that the first duty of a reviewer is
+towards the public; and I am willing to confess that the _Endymion_ is a
+poem considerably defective, and that perhaps it deserved as much
+censure as the pages of your Review record against it. But, not to
+mention that there is a certain contemptuousness of phraseology, from
+which it Is difficult for a critic to abstain, in the review of
+_Endymion_, I do not think that the writer has given it its due praise.
+Surely the poem, with all its faults, is a very remarkable production
+for a man of Keats's age[7]; and the promise of ultimate excellence is
+such as has rarely been afforded even by such as have afterwards
+attained high literary eminence. Look at book 2, line 833, &c., and book
+3, lines 113 to 120; read down that page, and then again from line
+193[8]. I could cite many other passages to convince you that it
+deserved milder usage. Why it should have been reviewed at all,
+excepting for the purpose of bringing its excellences into notice, I
+cannot conceive; for it was very little read, and there was no danger
+that it should become a model to the age of that false taste with which
+I confess that it is replenished.
+
+'Poor Keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this review,
+which, I am persuaded, was not written with any intention of producing
+the effect--to which it has at least greatly contributed--of embittering
+his existence, and inducing a disease from which there are now but faint
+hopes of his recovery. The first effects are described to me to have
+resembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching that he was
+restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. The agony of his
+sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in the
+lungs, and the usual process of consumption appears to have begun. He is
+coming to pay me a visit in Italy; but I fear that, unless his mind can
+be kept tranquil, little is to be hoped from the mere influence of
+climate.
+
+'But let me not extort anything from your pity. I have just seen a
+second volume, published by him evidently in careless despair. I have
+desired my bookseller to send you a copy: and allow me to solicit your
+especial attention to the fragment of a poem entitled _Hyperion_, the
+composition of which was checked by the review in question. The great
+proportion of this piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry.
+I speak impartially, for the canons of taste to which Keats has
+conformed in his other compositions are the very reverse of my own. I
+leave you to judge for yourself: it would be an insult to you to suppose
+that, from motives however honourable, you would lend yourself to a
+deception of the public.'
+
+The question arises, How did Shelley know what he here states--that
+Keats was thrown, by reading the _Quarterly_ article, into a state
+resembling insanity, that he contemplated suicide, &c.? Not any document
+has been published whereby this information could have been imparted to
+Shelley: his chief informant on the subject appears to have been Mr.
+Gisborne, who had now for a short while returned to England, and some
+confirmation may have come from Hunt. As to the statements themselves,
+they have, ever since the appearance in 1848 of Lord Houghton's _Life of
+Keats_, been regarded as very gross exaggerations: indeed, I think the
+tendency has since then been excessive in the reverse direction, and the
+vexation occasioned to Keats by hostile criticism has come to be
+underrated.
+
+Shelley addressed to Keats in Naples another letter, 'anxiously
+enquiring about his health, offering him advice as to the adaptation of
+diet to the climate, and concluding with an urgent invitation to Pisa,
+where he could assure him every comfort and attention.' Shelley did not,
+however, re-invite Keats to his own house on the present occasion;
+writing to Miss Clairmont, 'We are not rich enough for that sort of
+thing.' The letter to Miss Clairmont is dated 18 February, 1821, and
+appears to have been almost simultaneous with the one sent to Keats. In
+that case, Keats cannot be supposed to have received the invitation; for
+he had towards the middle of November quitted Naples for Rome, and by 18
+February he was almost at his last gasp.
+
+Shelley's feeling as to Keats's final volume of poems is further
+exhibited in the following extracts, (To Thomas Love Peacock, November,
+1820.) 'Among the modern things which have reached me is a volume of
+poems by Keats; in other respects insignificant enough, but containing
+the fragment of a poem called _Hyperion_, I dare say you have not time
+to read it; but it is certainly an astonishing piece of writing, and
+gives me a conception of Keats which I confess I had not before.' (To
+Mrs. Leigh Hunt, 11 November, 1820.) 'Keats's new volume has arrived to
+us, and the fragment called _Hyperion_ promises for him that he is
+destined to become one of the first writers of the age. His other things
+are imperfect enough[9], and, what is worse, written in the bad sort of
+style which is becoming fashionable among those who fancy that they are
+imitating Hunt and Wordsworth.... Where is Keats now? I am anxiously
+expecting him in Italy, when I shall take care to bestow every possible
+attention on him. I consider his a most valuable life, and I am deeply
+interested in his safety. I intend to be the physician both of his body
+and his soul,--to keep the one warm, and to teach the other Greek and
+Spanish. I am aware indeed, in part, that I am nourishing a rival who
+will far surpass me; and this is an additional motive, and will be an
+added pleasure.' (To Peacock, 15 February, 1821.) 'Among your anathemas
+of the modern attempts in poetry do you include Keats's _Hyperion_? I
+think it very fine. His other poems are worth little; but, if the
+_Hyperion_ be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our
+contemporaries.' There is also a phrase in a letter to Mr. Ollier,
+written on 14 May, 1820, before the actual publication of the _Lamia_
+volume: 'Keats, I hope, is going to show himself a great poet; like the
+sun, to burst through the clouds which, though dyed in the finest
+colours of the air, obscured his rising.'
+
+Keats died in Rome on 23 February, 1821. Soon afterwards Shelley wrote
+his _Adonais_. He has left various written references to _Adonais_, and
+to Keats in connexion with it: these will come more appropriately when I
+speak of that poem itself. But I may here at once quote from the letter
+which Shelley addressed on 16 June, 1821, to Mr. Gisborne, who had sent
+on to him a letter from Colonel Finch[10], giving a very painful account
+of the last days of Keats, and especially (perhaps in more than due
+proportion) of the violence of temper which he had exhibited. Shelley
+wrote thus: 'I have received the heartrending account of the closing
+scene of the great genius whom envy and ingratitude[11] scourged out of
+the world. I do not think that, if I had seen it before, I could have
+composed my poem. The enthusiasm of the imagination would have
+overpowered the sentiment. As it is, I have finished my Elegy; and this
+day I send it to the press at Pisa. You shall have a copy the moment it
+is completed, I think it will please you. I have dipped my pen in
+consuming fire for his destroyers: otherwise the style is calm and
+solemn[12].
+
+As I have already said, the last residence of Shelley was on the Gulf of
+Spezzia. He had a boat built named the Ariel (by Byron, the Don Juan),
+boating being his favourite recreation; and on 1 July, 1822, he and
+Lieut. Williams, along with a single sailor-lad, started in her for
+Leghorn, to welcome there Leigh Hunt. The latter had come to Italy with
+his family, on the invitation of Byron and Shelley, to join in a
+periodical to be called _The Liberal_. On 8 July Shelley, with his two
+companions, embarked to return to Casa Magni. Towards half-past six in
+the evening a sudden and tremendous squall sprang up. The Ariel sank,
+either upset by the squall, or (as some details of evidence suggest) run
+down near Viareggio by an Italian fishing-boat, the crew of which had
+plotted to plunder her of a sum of money. The bodies were eventually
+washed ashore; and on 16 August the corpse of Shelley was burned on the
+beach under the direction of Trelawny. In the pocket of his jacket had
+been found two books--a Sophocles, and the _Lamia_ volume, doubled back
+as if it had at the last moment been thrust aside. His ashes were
+collected, and, with the exception of the heart which was delivered to
+Mrs. Shelley, were buried in Rome, in the new Protestant Cemetery. The
+corpse of Shelley's beloved son William had, in 1819, been interred hard
+by, and in 1821 that of Keats, in the old Cemetery--a space of ground
+which had, by 1822, been finally closed.
+
+The enthusiastic and ideal fervour which marks Shelley's poetry could
+not possibly be simulated--it was a part, the most essential part, of
+his character. He was remarkably single-minded, in the sense of being
+constantly ready to do what he professed as, in the abstract, the right
+thing to be done; impetuous, bold, uncompromising, lavishly generous,
+and inspired by a general love of humankind, and a coequal detestation
+of all the narrowing influences of custom and prescription. Pity, which
+included self-pity, was one of his dominant emotions. If we consider
+what are the uses, and what the abuses, of a character of this type, we
+shall have some notion of the excellences and the defects of Shelley. In
+person he was well-grown and slim; more nearly beautiful than handsome;
+his complexion brilliant, his dark-brown but slightly grizzling hair
+abundant and wavy, and his eyes deep-blue, large, and fixed. His voice
+was high-pitched--at times discordant, but capable of agreeable
+modulation; his general aspect uncommonly youthful.
+
+The roll of Shelley's publications is a long one for a man who perished
+not yet thirty years of age. I append a list of the principal ones,
+according to date of publication, which was never very distant from that
+of composition. Several minor productions remain unspecified.
+
+
+1810. Zastrozzi, a Romance. Puerile rubbish.
+
+  "   Original Poetry, by Victor and Cazire.
+        Withdrawn, and ever since unknown.
+
+  "   Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson.
+        Balderdash, partly (it would appear) intended as burlesque.
+
+1811. St. Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian, a Romance.
+        No  better than Zastrozzi.
+
+1813. Queen Mab. Didactic and subversive.
+
+1817. Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, and other Poems.
+        The earliest volume fully worthy of its author.
+
+1818. Laon and Cythna--reissued as The Revolt of Islam.
+        An epic of revolution and emancipation in the
+        Spenserian Stanza.
+
+1819. Rosalind and Helen, a modern Eclogue, and other Poems.
+        The character of 'Lionel' is an evident
+        idealisation of Shelley himself.
+
+1819. The Cenci, a Tragedy. Has generally been regarded
+        as the finest English tragedy of modern date.
+
+  "   Prometheus Unbound, a Lyrical Drama, and other Poems.
+        The Prometheus ranks as at once the greatest and the most
+        thoroughly characteristic work of Shelley.
+
+1819. Oedipus Tyrannus, or Swellfoot the Tyrant. A
+        Satirical Drama on the Trial of Queen Caroline.
+
+1821. Epipsychidion. A poem of ideal love under a human personation.
+
+  "   Adonais.
+
+1822. Hellas. A Drama on the Grecian War of Liberation.
+
+1824. Posthumous Poems. Include Julian and Maddalo,
+        written in 1818, The Witch of Atlas, 1820, The
+        Triumph of Life, 1822, and many other compositions
+        and translations.
+
+
+The _Masque of Anarchy_ and _Peter Bell the Third_, both written by
+Shelley in 1819, were published later on; also various minor poems,
+complete or fragmentary. _Peter Bell the Third_ has a certain fortuitous
+connexion with Keats. It was written in consequence of Shelley's having
+read in _The Examiner_ a notice of _Peter Bell, a Lyrical Ballad_ (the
+production of John Hamilton Reynolds): and this notice, as has very
+recently been proved, was the handiwork of Keats. Shelley cannot have
+been aware of that fact. His prose _Essays and Letters_, including _The
+Defence of Poetry_, appeared in 1840. The only known work of Shelley,
+extant but yet unpublished, is the _Philosophical View of Reform_: an
+abstract of it, with several extracts, was printed in the _Fortnightly
+Review_ in 1886.
+
+
+
+
+MEMOIR OF KEATS.
+
+
+The parents of John Keats were Thomas Keats, and Frances, daughter of
+Mr. Jennings, who kept a large livery-stable, the Swan and Hoop, in the
+Pavement, Moorfields, London. Thomas Keats was the principal stableman
+or assistant in the same business. John, a seven months' child, was born
+at the Swan and Hoop on 31 October, 1795. Three other children grew
+up--George, Thomas, and Fanny, John is said to have been violent and
+ungovernable in early childhood. He was sent to a very well-reputed
+school, that of the Rev. John Clarke, at Enfield: the son Charles Cowden
+Clarke, whom I have previously mentioned, was an undermaster, and paid
+particular attention to Keats. The latter did not show any remarkable
+talent at school, but learned easily, and was 'a very orderly scholar,'
+acquiring a fair amount of Latin but no Greek. He was active,
+pugnacious, and popular among his school-fellows. The father died of a
+fall from his horse in April, 1804: the mother, after re-marrying,
+succumbed to consumption in February, 1810. Before the close of the same
+year John left school, and he was then apprenticed, to a surgeon at
+Edmonton. In July, 1815, he passed with credit the examination at
+Apothecaries' Hall.
+
+In 1812 Keats read for the first time Spenser's _Faery Queen_, and was
+fascinated with it to a singular degree. This and other poetic reading
+made him flag in his surgical profession, and finally he dropped it, and
+for the remainder of his life had no definite occupation save that of
+writing verse. From his grandparents he inherited a certain moderate sum
+of money--not more than sufficient to give him a tolerable start in
+life. He made acquaintance with Leigh Hunt, then editor of the
+_Examiner_, John Hunt, the publisher, Charles Wentworth Dilke who became
+editor of the _Athenaeum_, the painter Haydon, and others. His first
+volume of Poems (memorable for little else than the sonnet _On Reading
+Chapman's Homer_) was published in 1817. It was followed by _Endymion_
+in April, 1818.
+
+In June of the same year Keats set off with his chief intimate, Charles
+Armitage Brown (a retired Russia merchant who afterwards wrote a book on
+Shakespeare's Sonnets), on a pedestrian tour in Scotland, which extended
+into North Ireland as well. In July, in the Isle of Mull, he got a bad
+sore throat, of which some symptoms had appeared also in earlier years:
+it may be regarded as the beginning of his fatal malady. He cut short
+his tour and returned to Hampstead, where he had to nurse his younger
+brother Tom, a consumptive invalid, who died in December of the same
+year.
+
+At the house of the Dilkes, in the autumn of 1818, Keats made the
+acquaintance of Miss Fanny Brawne, the orphan daughter of a gentleman of
+independent means: he was soon desperately in love with her, having 'a
+swooning admiration of her beauty:' towards the spring of 1819 they
+engaged to marry, with the prospect of a long engagement. On the night
+of 3 February, 1820, on returning to the house at Hampstead which he
+shared with Mr. Brown, the poet had his first attack, a violent one, of
+blood-spitting from the lungs. He rallied somewhat, but suffered a
+dangerous relapse in June, just prior to the publication of his final
+volume, containing all his best poems--_Isabella, Hyperion, the Eve of
+St. Agnes, Lamia_, and the leading Odes. His doctor ordered him off, as
+a last chance, to Italy; previously to this he had been staying in the
+house of Mrs. and Miss Brawne, who tended him affectionately. Keats was
+now exceedingly unhappy. His passionate love, his easily roused feelings
+of jealousy of Miss Brawne, and of suspicious rancour against even the
+most amicable and attached of his male intimates, the general
+indifference and the particular scorn and ridicule with which his poems
+had been received, his narrow means and uncertain outlook, and the
+prospect of an early death closing a painful and harassing illness--all
+preyed upon his mind with unrelenting tenacity. The worst of all was the
+sense of approaching and probably final separation from Fanny Brawne.
+
+On 18 September, 1820, he left England for Italy, in company with Mr.
+Joseph Severn, a student of painting in the Royal Academy, who, having
+won the gold medal, was entitled to spend three years abroad for
+advancement in his art. They travelled by sea to Naples; reached that
+city late in October; and towards the middle of November went on to
+Rome. Here Keats received the most constant and kind attention from Dr.
+(afterwards Sir James) Clark. But all was of no avail: after continual
+and severe suffering, devotedly watched by Severn, he expired on 23
+February, 1821. He was buried in the old Protestant Cemetery of Rome,
+under a little altar-tomb sculptured with a Greek lyre. His name was
+inscribed, along with the epitaph which he himself had composed in the
+bitterness of his soul, 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.'
+
+Keats was an undersized man, little more than five feet high. His face
+was handsome, ardent, and full of expression; the hair rich, brown, and
+curling; the hazel eyes 'mellow and glowing--large, dark, and
+sensitive.' He was framed for enjoyment; but with that acuteness of
+feeling which turned even enjoyment into suffering, and then again
+extracted a luxury out of melancholy. He had vehemence and generosity,
+and the frankness which belongs to these qualities, not unmingled,
+however, with a strong dose of suspicion. Apart from the overmastering
+love of his closing years, his one ambition was to be a poet. His mind
+was little concerned either with the severe practicalities of life, or
+with the abstractions of religious faith.
+
+His poems, consisting of three successive volumes, have been already
+referred to here. The first volume, the _Poems_ of 1817, is mostly of a
+juvenile kind, containing only scattered suggestions of rich endowment
+and eventual excellence. _Endymion_ is lavish and profuse, nervous and
+languid, the wealth of a prodigal scattered in largesse of baubles and
+of gems. The last volume--comprising the _Hyperion_--is the work of a
+noble poetic artist, powerful and brilliant both in imagination and in
+expression. Of the writings published since their author's death, the
+only one of first-rate excellence is the fragmentary _Eve of St. Mark_.
+There is also the drama of _Otho the Great_, written in co-operation
+with Armitage Brown; and in Keats's letters many admirable thoughts are
+admirably worded.
+
+As to the relations between Shelley and Keats, I have to refer back to
+the preceding memoir of Shelley.
+
+
+
+
+ADONAIS:
+
+ITS COMPOSITION AND BIBLIOGRAPHY.
+
+
+For nearly two months after the death of Keats, 23 February, 1821,
+Shelley appears to have remained in ignorance of the event: he knew it
+on or before 19 April. The precise date when he began his Elegy does not
+seem to be recorded: one may suppose it to have been in the latter half
+of May. On 5 June he wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne: 'I have been
+engaged these last days in composing a poem on the death of Keats, which
+will shortly be finished; and I anticipate the pleasure of reading it to
+you, as some of the very few persons who will be interested in it and
+understand it. It is a highly wrought piece of art, and perhaps better,
+in point of composition, than anything I have written.'
+
+A letter to Mr. Ollier followed immediately afterwards.
+
+
+'Pisa, June 8th, 1821,
+
+'You may announce for publication a poem entitled _Adonais_. It is a
+lament on the death of poor Keats, with some interspersed stabs on the
+assassins of his peace and of his fame; and will be preceded by a
+criticism on _Hyperion_, asserting the due claims which that fragment
+gives him to the rank which I have assigned him. My poem is finished,
+and consists of about forty Spenser stanzas [fifty-five as published]. I
+shall send it to you, either printed at Pisa, or transcribed in such a
+manner as it shall be difficult for the reviser to leave such errors as
+assist the obscurity of the _Prometheus_. But in case I send it printed,
+it will be merely that mistakes may be avoided. I shall only have a few
+copies struck off in the cheapest manner. If you have interest enough in
+the subject, I could wish that you enquired of some of the friends and
+relations of Keats respecting the circumstances of his death, and could
+transmit me any information you may be able to collect; and especially
+as [to] the degree in which (as I am assured) the brutal attack in the
+_Quarterly Review_ excited the disease by which he perished.'
+
+
+The criticism which Shelley intended to write on _Hyperion_ remained, to
+all appearance, unwritten. It will be seen, from the letter of Shelley
+to Mr. Severn cited further on (p. 34), that, from the notion of writing
+a criticism on _Hyperion_ to precede _Adonais_, his intention developed
+into the project of writing a criticism and biography of Keats in
+general, to precede a volume of his entire works; but that, before the
+close of November, the whole scheme was given up, on the ground that it
+would produce no impression on an unregardful public.
+
+In another letter to Ollier, 11 June, the poet says: 'Adonais is
+finished, and you will soon receive it. It is little adapted for
+popularity, but is perhaps the least imperfect of my compositions.'
+
+Shelley on 16 June caused his Elegy to be printed in Pisa, 'with the
+types of Didot': a small quarto, and a handsome one (notwithstanding his
+project of cheapness); the introductory matter filling five pages, and
+the poem itself going on from p. 7 to p. 25. It appeared in blue paper
+wrappers, with a woodcut of a basket of flowers within an ornamental
+border. Its price was three and sixpence: of late years £40 has been
+given for it--perhaps more. Up to 13 July only one copy had reached the
+author's hands: this he then sent on to the Gisbornes, at Leghorn. Some
+copies of the Pisa edition were afterwards put into circulation in
+London: there was no separate English edition. The Gisbornes having
+acknowledged the Elegy with expressions of admiration, the poet replied
+as follows:
+
+
+'Bagni [di Pisa], July 19.
+
+'MY DEAREST FRIENDS,
+
+'I am fully repaid for the painful emotions from which some verses of my
+poem sprung by your sympathy and approbation; which is all the reward I
+expect, and as much as I desire. It is not for me to judge whether, in
+the high praise your feelings assign me, you are right or wrong. The
+poet and the man are two different natures: though they exist together,
+they may be unconscious of each other, and incapable of deciding on each
+other's powers and efforts by any reflex act. The decision of the cause
+whether or not I am a poet is removed from the present time to the hour
+when our posterity shall assemble: but the court is a very severe one,
+and I fear that the verdict will be "Guilty--death."'
+
+
+A letter to Mr. Ollier was probably a little later. It says: 'I send you
+a sketch for a frontispiece to the poem _Adonais_. Pray let it be put
+into the engraver's hands immediately, as the poem is already on its way
+to you, and I should wish it to be ready for its arrival. The poem is
+beautifully printed, and--what is of more consequence--correctly:
+indeed, it was to obtain this last point that I sent it to the press at
+Pisa. In a few days you will receive the bill of lading.' Nothing is
+known as to the sketch which Shelley thus sent. It cannot, I presume,
+have been his own production, nor yet Severn's: possibly it was supplied
+by Lieutenant Williams, who had some aptitude as an amateur artist.
+
+I add some of the poet's other expressions regarding _Adonais_, which he
+evidently regarded with more complacency than any of his previous
+works--at any rate, as a piece of execution. Hitherto his favourite had
+been _Prometheus Unbound_: I am fain to suppose that that great effort
+did not now hold a second place in his affections, though he may have
+considered that the _Adonais_, as being a less arduous feat, came nearer
+to reaching its goal. (To Peacock, August, 1821.) 'I have sent you by
+the Gisbornes a copy of the Elegy on Keats. The subject, I know, will
+not please you; but the composition of the poetry, and the taste in
+which it is written, I do not think bad.' (To Hunt, 26 August.) 'Before
+this you will have seen _Adonais_. Lord Byron--I suppose from modesty on
+account of his being mentioned in it--did not say a word of
+_Adonais_[13], though he was loud in his praise of _Prometheus_, and
+(what you will not agree with him in) censure of _The Cenci_.' (To
+Horace Smith, 14 September,) 'I am glad you like _Adonais_, and
+particularly that you do not think it metaphysical, which I was afraid
+it was. I was resolved to pay some tribute of sympathy to the unhonoured
+dead; but I wrote, as usual, with a total ignorance of the effect that I
+should produce.' (To Ollier, 25 September.) 'The _Adonais_, in spite of
+its mysticism, is the least imperfect of my compositions; and, as the
+image of my regret and honour for poor Keats, I wish it to be so. I
+shall write to you probably by next post on the subject of that poem;
+and should have sent the promised criticism for the second edition, had
+I not mislaid, and in vain sought for, the volume that contains
+_Hyperion_.' (To Ollier, 14 November.) 'I am especially curious to hear
+the fate of _Adonais_. I confess I should be surprised if that poem were
+born to an immortality of oblivion.' (To Ollier, 11 January, 1822.) 'I
+was also more than commonly interested in the success of _Adonais_. I do
+not mean the sale, but the effect produced; and I should have [been]
+glad to have received some communication from you respecting it. I do
+not know even whether it has been published, and still less whether it
+has been republished with the alterations I sent.' As to the alterations
+sent nothing definite is known, but some details bearing on this point
+will be found in our Notes, p. 105, &c. (To Gisborne, 10 April) 'I know
+what to think of _Adonais_, but what to think of those who confound it
+with the many bad poems of the day I know not.' This expression seems to
+indicate that Mr. Gisborne had sent Shelley some of the current
+criticisms--there were probably but few in all--upon _Adonais_: to this
+matter I shall recur further on. (To Gisborne, 18 June.) 'The _Adonais_
+I wished to have had a fair chance, both because it is a favourite with
+me, and on account of the memory of Keats--who was a poet of great
+genius, let the classic party say what it will.'
+
+Earlier than the latest of these extracts Shelley had sent to Mr. Severn
+a copy of _Adonais_, along with a letter which I append.
+
+
+'Pisa, Nov. 29th, 1821.
+
+'DEAR SIR,
+
+'I send you the Elegy on poor Keats, and I wish it were better worth
+your acceptance. You will see, by the preface, that it was written
+before I could obtain any particular account of his last moments. All
+that I still know was communicated to me by a friend who had derived his
+information from Colonel Finch, I have ventured [in the Preface] to
+express as I felt the respect and admiration which _your_ conduct
+towards him demands.
+
+'In spite of his transcendent genius, Keats never was, nor ever will be,
+a popular poet; and the total neglect and obscurity in which the
+astonishing remains of his mind still lie was hardly to be dissipated by
+a writer who, however he may differ from Keats in more important
+qualities, at least resembles him in that accidental one, a want of
+popularity.
+
+'I have little hope therefore that the poem I send you will excite any
+attention, nor do I feel assured that a critical notice of his writings
+would find a single reader. But for these considerations, it had been my
+intention to have collected the remnants of his compositions, and to
+have published them with a Life and criticism. Has he left any poems or
+writings of whatsoever kind, and in whose possession are they? Perhaps
+you would oblige me by information on this point.
+
+'Many thanks for the picture you promise me [presumably a portrait of
+Keats, but Shelley does not seem ever to have received one from Severn]:
+I shall consider it among the most sacred relics of the past. For my
+part, I little expected, when I last saw Keats at my friend Leigh
+Hunt's, that I should survive him.
+
+'Should you ever pass through Pisa, I hope to have the pleasure of
+seeing you, and of cultivating an acquaintance into something pleasant,
+begun under such melancholy auspices.
+
+'Accept, my dear Sir, the assurance of my highest esteem, and believe me
+
+'Your most sincere and faithful servant,
+
+'PERCY B. SHELLEY.
+
+'Do you know Leigh Hunt? I expect him and his family here every day.'
+
+
+It may have been observed that Shelley, whenever he speaks of critical
+depreciation of Keats, refers only to one periodical, the _Quarterly
+Review_: probably he did not distinctly know of any other: but the fact
+is that _Blackwood's Magazine_ was worse than the _Quarterly_. The
+latter was sneering and supercilious: _Blackwood_ was vulgarly taunting
+and insulting, and seems to have provoked Keats the more of the two,
+though perhaps he considered the attack in the _Quarterly_ to be more
+detrimental to his literary standing. The _Quarterly_ notice is of so
+much import in the life and death of Keats, and in the genesis of
+_Adonais_, that I shall give it, practically _in extenso_, before
+closing this section of my work: with _Blackwood_ I can deal at once. A
+series of articles _On the Cockney School of Poetry_ began in this
+magazine in October, 1817, being directed mainly and very venomously
+against Leigh Hunt. No. 4 of the series appeared in August, 1818,
+falling foul of Keats. It is difficult to say whether the priority in
+abusing Keats should of right be assigned to _Blackwood_ or to the
+_Quarterly_: the critique in the latter review belongs to the number for
+April, 1818, but this number was not actually issued until September.
+The writer of the _Blackwood_ papers signed himself Z. Z. is affirmed to
+have been Lockhart, the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, and afterwards
+editor of the _Quarterly Review_: more especially the article upon Keats
+is attributed to Lockhart. A different account, as to the series in
+general, is that the author was John Wilson (Christopher North), revised
+by Mr. William Blackwood. But Z. resisted more than one vigorous
+challenge to unmask, and some doubt as to his identity may still remain.
+Here are some specimens of the amenity with which Keats was treated in
+_Blackwood's Magazine_:--
+
+'His friends, we understand, destined him to the career of medicine, and
+he was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in
+town.... The frenzy of the _Poems_ [Keats's first volume, 1817] was bad
+enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the
+calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of _Endymion_.... We
+hope however that, in so young a person and with a constitution
+originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable....
+Mr. Hunt is a small poet, but a clever man; Mr. Keats is a still smaller
+poet, and he is only a boy of pretty abilities which he has done
+everything in his power to spoil.... It is a better and wiser thing to
+be a starved apothecary than a starved poet: so back to the shop, Mr.
+John, back to "plaster, pills, and ointment-boxes," &c. But for Heaven's
+sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and
+soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.'
+
+Even the death of Keats, in 1821, did not abate the rancour of
+_Blackwood's Magazine_. Witness the following extracts. (1823) 'Keats
+had been dished--utterly demolished and dished--by _Blackwood_ long
+before Mr. Gifford's scribes mentioned his name.... But let us hear no
+more of Johnny Keats. It is really too disgusting to have him and his
+poems recalled in this manner after all the world thought they had got
+rid of the concern.' (1824) 'Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume
+of Mr. Keats's poetry "grasped with one hand in his bosom"--rather an
+awkward posture, as you will be convinced if you try it. But what a rash
+man Shelley was to put to sea in a frail boat with Jack's poetry on
+board!... Down went the boat with a "swirl"! I lay a wager that it
+righted soon after ejecting Jack.'... (1826) 'Keats was a Cockney, and
+Cockneys claimed him for their own. Never was there a young man so
+encrusted with conceit.'
+
+If this is the tone adopted by _Blackwood's Magazine_ in relation to
+Keats living and dead, one need not be surprised to find that the
+verdict of the same review upon the poem of _Adonais_, then newly
+published, ran to the following effect:--
+
+'Locke says the most resolute liar cannot lie more than once in every
+three sentences. Folly is more engrossing; for we could prove from the
+present Elegy that it is possible to write two sentences of pure
+nonsense out of three. A more faithful calculation would bring us to
+ninety-nine out of every hundred; or--as the present consists of only
+fifty-five stanzas--leaving about five readable lines in the entire....
+A Mr. Keats, who had left a decent calling for the melancholy trade of
+Cockney poetry, has lately died of a consumption, after having written
+two or three little books of verses much neglected by the public.... The
+New School, however, will have it that he was slaughtered by a criticism
+of the _Quarterly Review_: "O flesh, how art thou fishified!" There is
+even an aggravation in this cruelty of the Review--for it had taken
+three or four years to slay its victim, the deadly blow having been
+inflicted at least as long since. [This is not correct: the _Quarterly_
+critique, having appeared in September, 1818, preceded the death of
+Keats by two years and five months].... The fact is, the _Quarterly_,
+finding before it a work at once silly and presumptuous, full of the
+servile _slang_ that Cockaigne dictates to its servitors, and the vulgar
+indecorums which that Grub Street Empire rejoiceth to applaud, told the
+truth of the volume, and recommended a change of manners[14] and of
+masters to the scribbler. Keats wrote on; but he wrote _indecently_,
+probably in the indulgence of his social propensities.'
+
+The virulence with which Shelley, as author of _Adonais_, was assailed
+by _Blackwood's Magazine_, is the more remarkable, and the more
+symptomatic of partizanship against Keats and any of his upholders, as
+this review had in previous instances been exceptionally civil to
+Shelley, though of course with some serious offsets. The notices of
+_Alastor, Rosalind and Helen_, and _Prometheus Unbound_--more especially
+the first--in the years 1819 and 1820, would be found to bear out this
+statement.
+
+From the dates already cited, it may be assumed that the Pisan edition
+of _Adonais_ was in London in the hands of Mr. Ollier towards the middle
+of August, 1821, purchasable by whoever might be minded to buy it. Very
+soon afterwards it was reprinted in the _Literary Chronicle and Weekly
+Review_, published by Limbird in the Strand--1 December, 1821: a rather
+singular, not to say piratical, proceeding. An editorial note was worded
+thus: 'Through the kindness of a friend, we have been favoured with the
+latest production of a gentleman of no ordinary genius, Mr. Bysshe
+Shelley. It is an elegy on the death of a youthful poet of considerable
+promise, Mr. Keats, and was printed at Pisa. As the copy now before us
+is perhaps [surely not] the only one that has reached England, and the
+subject is one that will excite much interest, we shall print the whole
+of it.' This promise was not literally fulfilled, for stanzas 19 to 24
+were omitted, not apparently with any special object.
+
+After the publication in London of the Pisan edition of _Adonais_, the
+poem remained unreprinted until 1829. It was then issued at Cambridge,
+at the instance of Lord Houghton (Mr. Richard Monckton Milnes) and Mr.
+Arthur Hallam, the latter having brought from Italy a copy of the
+original pamphlet. The Cambridge edition, an octavo in paper wrappers,
+is now still scarcer than the Pisan one. The only other separate edition
+of _Adonais_ was that of Mr. Buxton Forman, 1876, corresponding
+substantially with the form which the poem assumes in the _Complete
+Works of Shelley_, as produced by the same editor. It need hardly be
+said that _Adonais_ was included in Mrs. Shelley's editions of her
+husband's Poems, and in all other editions of any fulness: it has also
+appeared in most of the volumes of Selections.
+
+As early as 1830 there was an Italian translation of this Elegy. It is
+named _Adone, nella morte di Giovanni Keats, Elegia di Percy Bishe
+Shelley, tradotta da L. A. Damaso Pareto_. _Genova, dalla Tifografia
+Pellas_, 1830. In this small quarto thirty pages are occupied by a
+notice of the life and poetry of Shelley.
+
+I shall not here enter upon a consideration of the cancelled passages of
+_Adonais_: they will appear more appositely further on (see pp. 92-94,
+&c.). I therefore conclude the present section by quoting the _Quarterly
+Review_ article upon _Endymion_--omitting only a few sentences which do
+not refer directly to Keats, but mostly to Leigh Hunt:--
+
+'Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which
+they affected to criticise. On the present occasion we shall anticipate
+the author's complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his
+work. Not that we have been wanting in our duty; far from it; indeed, we
+have made efforts, almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to
+be, to get through it: but, with the fullest stretch of our
+perseverance, we are forced to confess that we have not been able to
+struggle beyond the first of the four books of which this Poetic Romance
+consists. We should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it
+may be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation--namely, that we
+are no better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we
+have so painfully toiled than we are with that of the three which we
+have not looked into.
+
+'It is not that Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt
+that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a
+rhapsody)--it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of
+language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius. He has all these: but he
+is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere
+called "Cockney Poetry," which may be defined to consist of the most
+incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language.
+
+'Of this school Mr. Leigh Hunt, as we observed in a former number,
+aspires to be the hierophant.... This author is a copyist of Mr. Hunt,
+but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and
+ten times more tiresome and absurd, than his prototype, who, though he
+impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to
+measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning.
+But Mr. Keats had advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by
+examples. His nonsense, therefore, is quite gratuitous; he writes it for
+its own sake, and, being bitten by Mr. Leigh Hunt's insane criticism,
+more than rivals the insanity of his poetry.
+
+'Mr. Keats's preface hints that his poem was produced under peculiar
+circumstances. "Knowing within myself." he says, "the manner in which
+this poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that
+I make it public. What manner I mean will be quite clear to the reader,
+who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error
+denoting a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished." We humbly
+beg his pardon, but this does not appear to us to be "quite so clear";
+we really do not know what he means. But the next passage is more
+intelligible. "The two first books, and indeed the two last, I feel
+sensible, are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the
+press." Thus "the two first books" are, even in his own judgment, unfit
+to appear, and "the two last" are, it seems, in the same condition; and,
+as two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books, we
+have a clear, and we believe a very just, estimate of the entire work.
+
+'Mr. Keats, however, deprecates criticism on this "immature and feverish
+work" in terms which are themselves sufficiently feverish; and we
+confess that we should have abstained from inflicting upon him any of
+the tortures of the "fierce hell" of criticism[15] which terrify his
+imagination if he had not begged to be spared in order that he might
+write more; if we had not observed in him a certain degree of talent
+which deserves to be put in the right way, or which at least ought to be
+warned of the wrong; and if finally he had not told us that he is of an
+age and temper which imperiously require mental discipline.
+
+'Of the story we have been able to make out but little. It seems to be
+mythological, and probably relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion;
+but of this, as the scope of the work has altogether escaped us, we
+cannot speak with any degree of certainty, and must therefore content
+ourselves with giving some instances of its diction and versification.
+And here again we are perplexed and puzzled. At first it appeared to us
+that Mr. Keats had been amusing himself and wearying his readers with an
+immeasurable game at _bouts rimés_; but, if we recollect rightly, it is
+an indispensable condition at this play that the rhymes, when filled up,
+shall have a meaning; and our author, as we have already hinted, has no
+meaning. He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows,
+not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the _rhyme_
+with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a
+complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another,
+from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds; and the work is
+composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced
+themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which
+they turn.
+
+'We shall select, not as the most striking instance, but as that least
+liable to suspicion, a passage from the opening of the poem;--
+
+
+               "Such the sun, the moon,
+Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
+For simple sheep; and such are daffodils,
+With the green world they live in; and clear rills
+That for themselves a cooling covert make
+'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake
+Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
+And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
+We have imagined for the mighty dead," &c.
+
+
+Here it is clear that the word, and not the idea, _moon_, produces the
+simple sheep and their shady _boon_, and that "the _dooms_ of the mighty
+dead" would never have intruded themselves but for the "fair musk-rose
+_blooms_."
+
+'Again:--
+
+
+"For 'twas the morn. Apollo's upward fire
+Made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre
+Of brightness so unsullied that therein
+A melancholy spirit well might win
+Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine
+Into the winds. Rain-scented eglantine
+Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun;
+The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run
+To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass;
+Man's voice was on the mountains; and the mass
+Of Nature's lives and wonders pulsed tenfold
+To feel this sunrise and its glories old."
+
+
+Here Apollo's _fire_ produces a _pyre_--a silvery pyre--of clouds,
+_wherein_ a spirit might _win_ oblivion, and melt his essence _fine_;
+and scented _eglantine_ gives sweets to the _sun_, and cold springs had
+_run_ into the _grass_; and then the pulse of the _mass_ pulsed
+_tenfold_ to feel the glories _old_ of the new-born day, &c.
+
+'One example more:--
+
+
+"Be still the unimaginable lodge
+For solitary thinkings, such as dodge
+Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
+Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven
+That spreading in this dull and clodded earth,
+Gives it a touch ethereal--a new birth."
+
+
+_Lodge, dodge--heaven, leaven--earth, birth_--such, in six words, is the
+sum and substance of six lines.
+
+'We come now to the author's taste in versification. He cannot indeed
+write a sentence, but perhaps he may be able to spin a line. Let us see.
+The following are specimens of his prosodial notions of our English
+heroic metre:--
+
+
+"Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
+The passion poesy, glories infinite.
+
+"So plenteously all weed-hidden roots.
+
+"Of some strange history, potent to send.
+
+"Before the deep intoxication.
+
+"Her scarf into a fluttering pavilion.
+
+"The stubborn canvas for my voyage prepared.
+
+"Endymion, the cave is secreter
+Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir
+No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise
+Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys
+And trembles through my labyrinthine hair."
+
+
+'By this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the
+meaning of his sentences and the structure of his lines. We now present
+them with some of the new words with which, in imitation of Mr. Leigh
+Hunt, he adorns our language.
+
+'We are told that turtles _passion_ their voices; that an arbour was
+_nested_, and a lady's locks _gordianed_ up; and, to supply the place of
+the nouns thus verbalized, Mr. Keats, with great fecundity, spawns new
+ones, such as men-slugs and human _serpentry_, the _honey-feel_ of
+bliss, wives prepare _needments_, and so forth.
+
+'Then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their
+natural tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads. Thus
+the wine out-sparkled, the multitude up-followed, and night up-took: the
+wind up-blows, and the hours are down-sunken. But, if he sinks some
+adverbs in the verbs, he compensates the language with adverbs and
+adjectives which he separates from the parent stock. Thus a lady
+whispers _pantingly_ and close, makes _hushing_ signs, and steers her
+skiff into a _ripply_ cove, a shower falls _refreshfully_, and a vulture
+has a _spreaded_ tail.
+
+'But enough of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte. If any one should
+be bold enough to purchase this Poetic Romance, and so much more patient
+than ourselves as to get beyond the first book, and so much more
+fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted
+with his success. We shall then return to the task which we now abandon
+in despair, and endeavour to make all due amends to Mr. Keats and to our
+readers.'
+
+
+This criticism is not, I think, exactly what Shelley called it in the
+Preface to _Adonais_--'savage:' it is less savage than contemptuous, and
+is far indeed from competing with the abuse which was from time to time,
+and in various reviews, poured forth upon Shelley himself. It cannot be
+denied that some of the blemishes which it points out in _Endymion_ are
+real blemishes, and very serious ones. The grounds on which one can
+fairly object to the criticism are that its tone is purposely
+ill-natured; its recognition of merits scanty out of all proportion to
+its censure of defects; and its spirit that of prepense disparagement
+founded not so much on the poetical errors of Keats as on the fact that
+he was a friend of Leigh Hunt, the literary and also the political
+antagonist of the _Quarterly Review_. The editor, Mr. Gifford, seems
+always to have been regarded as the author of this criticism--I presume,
+correctly so.
+
+That Keats was a friend of Leigh Hunt in the earlier period of his own
+poetical career is a fact; but not long after the appearance of the
+_Quarterly Review_ article he conceived a good deal of dislike and even
+animosity against this literary ally. Possibly the taunts of the
+_Quarterly Review_, and the alienation of Keats from Hunt, had some
+connexion as cause and effect. In a letter from John Keats to his
+brother George and his sister-in-law occurs the following passage[16],
+dated towards the end of 1818: 'Hunt has asked me to meet Tom Moore some
+day--so you shall hear of him. The night we went to Novello's there was
+a complete set-to of Mozart and punning. I was so completely tired of it
+that, if I were to follow my own inclinations, I should never meet any
+one of that set again; not even Hunt, who is certainly a pleasant fellow
+in the main, when you are with him--but in reality he is vain,
+egotistical, and disgusting in matters of taste, and in morals. He
+understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other
+minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself professes,
+he begins an explanation in such a curious manner that our taste and
+self-love are offended continually. Hunt does one harm by making fine
+things petty, and beautiful things hateful. Through him I am indifferent
+to Mozart, I care not for white busts; and many a glorious thing, when
+associated with him, becomes a nothing. This distorts one's mind--makes
+one's thoughts bizarre--perplexes one in the standard of Beauty.'
+
+For the text of _Adonais_ in the present edition I naturally have
+recourse to the original Pisan edition, but without neglecting such
+alterations as have been properly introduced into later issues; these
+will be fully indicated and accounted for in my Notes. In the minor
+matters of punctuation, &c., I do not consider myself bound to reproduce
+the first or any other edition, but I follow the plan which appears to
+myself most reasonable and correct; any point worthy of discussion in
+these details will also receive attention in the Notes.
+
+
+
+
+ADONAIS:
+
+ITS ARGUMENT.
+
+
+The poem of _Adonais_ can of course be contemplated from different
+points of view. Its biographical relations have been already considered
+in our preceding sections: its poetical structure and value, its ideal
+or spiritual significance, and its particular imagery and diction, will
+occupy us much as we proceed. At present I mean simply to deal with the
+Argument of _Adonais_. It has a thread--certainly a slender thread--of
+narrative or fable; the personation of the poetic figure Adonais, as
+distinct from the actual man John Keats, and the incidents with which
+that poetic figure is associated. The numerals which I put in
+parentheses indicate the stanzas in which the details occur.
+
+(1) Adonais is now dead: the Hour which witnessed his loss mourns him,
+and is to rouse the other Hours to mourn. (2) He was the son of the
+widowed Urania, (6) her youngest and dearest son. (2) He was slain by a
+nightly arrow--'pierced by the shaft which flies in darkness.' At the
+time of his death Urania was in her paradise (pleasure-garden),
+slumbering, while Echoes listened to the poems which he had written as
+death was impending. (3) Urania should now wake and weep; yet wherefore?
+'He is gone where all things wise and fair descend.' (4) Nevertheless
+let her weep and lament. (7) Adonais had come to Rome. (8) Death and
+Corruption are now in his chamber, but Corruption delays as yet to
+strike. (9) The Dreams whom he nurtured, as a herdsman tends his flock,
+mourn around him, (10) One of them was deceived for a moment into
+supposing that a tear shed by itself came from the eyes of Adonais, and
+must indicate that he was still alive. (11) Another washed his limbs,
+and a third clipped and shed her locks upon his corpse, &c. (13) Then
+came others--Desires, Adorations, Fantasies, &c. (14 to 16) Morning
+lamented, and Echo, and Spring. (17) Aibion wailed. May 'the curse of
+Cain light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast,' and scared away
+its angel soul! (20) Can it be that the soul alone dies, when nothing
+else is annihilated? (22) Misery aroused Urania: urged by Dreams and
+Echoes, she sprang up, and (23) sought the death-chamber of Adonais,
+(24) enduring much suffering from 'barbèd tongues, and thoughts more
+sharp than they.' (25) As she arrived, Death was shamed for a moment,
+and Adonais breathed again: but immediately afterwards 'Death rose and
+smiled, and met her vain caress.' (26) Urania would fain have died along
+with Adonais; but, chained as she was to Time, this was denied her. (27)
+She reproached Adonais for having, though defenceless, dared the dragon
+in his den. Had he waited till the day of his maturity, 'the monsters of
+life's waste' would have fled from him, as (28) the wolves, ravens, and
+vultures had fled from, and fawned upon, 'the Pythian of the age.' (30)
+Then came the Mountain Shepherds, bewailing Adonais: the Pilgrim of
+Eternity, the Lyrist of lerne, and (31) among others, one frail form, a
+pard-like spirit. (34) Urania asked the name of this last Shepherd: he
+then made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, which was like Cain's
+or Christ's. (35) Another Mountain Shepherd, 'the gentlest of the wise,'
+leaned over the deathbed. (36) Adonais has drunk poison. Some 'deaf and
+viperous murderer' gave him the envenomed draught.
+
+[I must here point out a singular discrepancy in the poem of _Adonais_,
+considered as a narrative or apologue. Hitherto we had been told that
+Adonais was killed by an arrow or dart--he was 'pierced by the shaft
+which flies in darkness,' and the man who 'pierced his innocent breast'
+had incurred the curse of Cain: he had 'a wound' (stanza 22). There was
+also the alternative statement that Adonais, unequipped with the shield
+of wisdom or the spear of scorn, had been so rash as to 'dare the
+unpastured dragon in his den'; and from this the natural inference is
+that not any 'shaft which flies in darkness,' but the dragon himself,
+had slaughtered the too-venturous youth. But now we hear that he was
+done to death by poison. Certainly when we look beneath the symbol into
+the thing symbolized, we can see that these divergent allegations
+represent the same fact, and the readers of the Elegy are not called
+upon to form themselves into a coroner's jury to determine whether a
+'shaft' or a 'dragon' or 'poison' was the instrument of murder:
+nevertheless the statements in the text are neither identical nor
+reconcileable for purposes of mythical narration, and it seems strange
+that the author should not have taken this into account. It will be
+found as we proceed (see p. 66) that the reference to 'poison' comes
+into the poem as a direct reproduction from the Elegy of Moschus upon
+Bion--being the passage which forms the second of the two mottoes to
+_Adonais_.]
+
+(36) This murderer, a 'nameless worm,' was alone callous to the prelude
+of the forthcoming song. (37) Let him live on in remorse and
+self-contempt. (38) Neither should we weep that Adonais has 'fled far
+from these carrion-kites that scream below.' His spirit flows back to
+its fountain, a portion of the Eternal. (39) Indeed, he is not dead nor
+sleeping, but 'has awakened from the dream of life.' Not he decays, but
+we. (41) Let not us, nor the powers of Nature, mourn for _Adonais_. (42)
+He is made one with Nature. (45) In 'the unapparent' he was welcomed by
+Chatterton, Sidney, Lucan, and (46) many more immortals, and was hailed
+as the master of a 'kingless sphere' in a 'heaven of song.' (48) Let any
+rash mourner go to Rome, and (49) visit the cemetery. (53) And thou, my
+heart, why linger and shrink? Adonais calls thee: be no longer divided
+from him. (55) The soul of Adonais beacons to thee 'from the abode where
+the Eternal are.'
+
+
+This may he the most convenient place for raising a question of leading
+importance to the Argument of _Adonais_--Who is the personage designated
+under the name Urania?--a question which, so far as I know, has never
+yet been mooted among the students of Shelley. Who is Urania? Why is she
+represented as the mother of Adonais (Keats), and the chief mourner for
+his untimely death?
+
+In mythology the name Urania is assigned to two divinities wholly
+distinct. The first is one of the nine Muses, the Muse of Astronomy: the
+second is Aphrodite (Venus). We may without any hesitation assume that
+Shelley meant one of these two: but a decision, as to which of the two
+becomes on reflection by no means so obvious as one might at first
+suppose. We will first examine the question as to the Muse Urania.
+
+To say that the poet Keats, figured as Adonais, was son to one of the
+Muses, appears so natural and straightforward a symbolic suggestion as
+to command summary assent. But why, out of the nine sisters, should the
+Muse of Astronomy be selected? Keats never wrote about astronomy, and
+had no qualifications and no faintest inclination for writing about it:
+this science, and every other exact or speculative science, were highly
+alien from his disposition and turn of mind. And yet, on casting about
+for a reason, we can find that after all and in a certain sense there is
+one forthcoming, of some considerable amount of relevancy. In the eyes
+of Shelley, Keats was principally and above all the poet of _Hyperion_;
+and _Hyperion_ is, strictly speaking, a poem about the sun. In like
+manner, _Endymion_ is a poem about the moon. Thus, from one point of
+view--I cannot see any other--Keats might be regarded as inspired by, or
+a son of, the Muse of Astronomy. A subordinate point of some difficulty
+arises from stanza 6, where Adonais is spoken of as 'the nursling of thy
+[Urania's] widowhood'--which seems to mean, son of Urania, born after
+the father's death. Urania is credited in mythology with the motherhood
+of two sons--Linus, her offspring by Amphimacus, who was a son of
+Poseidon, and Hymenaeus, her offspring by Apollo. It might be idle to
+puzzle over this question of Urania's 'widowhood,' or to attempt to
+found upon it (on the assumption that Urania the Muse is referred to)
+any theory as to who her deceased consort could have been: for it is as
+likely as not that the phrase which I have cited from the poem is not
+really intended to define with any sort of precision the parentage of
+the supposititious Adonais, but, practically ignoring Adonais, applies
+to Keats himself, and means simply that Keats, as the son of the Muse,
+was born out of time--born in an unpoetical and unappreciative age. Many
+of my readers will recollect that Milton, in the elaborate address which
+opens Book 7 of _Paradise Lost_, invokes Urania. He is careful however
+to say that he does not mean the Muse Urania, but the spirit of
+'Celestial Song,' sister of Eternal Wisdom, both of them well-pleasing
+to the 'Almighty Father.' Thus far for Urania the Muse.
+
+I now come to Aphrodite Urania. This deity is to be carefully
+distinguished from the Cyprian or Pandemic Aphrodite: she is different,
+not only in attribute and function, but even in personality and origin.
+She is the daughter of Heaven (Uranus) and Light; her influence is
+heavenly: she is heavenly or spiritual love, as distinct from earthly or
+carnal love. If the personage in Shelley's Elegy is to be regarded, not
+as the Muse Urania, but as Aphrodite Urania, she here represents
+spiritual or intellectual aspiration, the love of abstract beauty, the
+divine element in poesy or art. As such, Aphrodite Urania would be no
+less appropriate than Urania or any other Muse to be designated as the
+mother of Adonais (Keats). But the more cogent argument in favour of
+Aphrodite Urania is to be based upon grounds of analogy or transfer,
+rather than upon any reasons of antecedent probability. The part
+assigned to Urania in Shelley's Elegy is very closely modelled upon the
+part assigned to Aphrodite in the Elegy of Bion upon Adonis (see the
+section in this volume, _Bion and Moschus_). What Aphrodite Cypris does
+in the _Adonis_, that Urania does in the _Adonais_. The resemblances are
+exceedingly close, in substance and in detail: the divergences are only
+such as the altered conditions naturally dictate. The Cyprian Aphrodite
+is the bride of Adonis, and as such she bewails him: the Uranian
+Aphrodite is the mother of Adonais, and she laments him accordingly.
+Carnal relationship and carnal love are transposed into spiritual
+relationship and spiritual love. The hands are the hands, in both poems,
+of Aphrodite: the voices are respectively those of Cypris and of Urania.
+
+It is also worth observing that the fragmentary poem of Shelley named
+_Prince Athanase_, written in 1817, was at first named _Pandemos and
+Urania_; and was intended, as Mrs. Shelley informs us, to embody the
+contrast between 'the earthly and unworthy Venus,' and the nobler ideal
+of love, the heaven-born or heaven-sent Venus. The poem would thus have
+borne a certain relation to _Alastor_, and also to _Epipsychidion_. The
+use of the name 'Urania' in this proposed title may help to confirm us
+in the belief that there is no reason why Shelley should not have used
+the same name in _Adonais_ with the implied meaning of Aphrodite Urania.
+
+On the whole I am strongly of opinion that the Urania of _Adonais_ is
+Aphrodite, and not the Muse.
+
+
+
+
+ADONAIS:
+
+GENERAL EXPOSITION.
+
+
+The consideration which, in the preceding section, we have bestowed upon
+the 'Argument' of _Adonais_ will assist us not a little in grasping the
+full scope of the poem. It may be broadly divided into three currents of
+thought, or (as one might say) into three acts of passion. I. The sense
+of grievous loss in the death of John Keats the youthful and aspiring
+poet, cut short as he was approaching his prime; and the instinctive
+impulse to mourning and desolation. 2. The mythical or symbolic
+embodiment of the events in the laments of Urania and the Mountain
+Shepherds, and in the denunciation of the ruthless destroyer of the
+peace and life of Adonais. 3. The rejection of mourning as one-sided,
+ignorant, and a reversal of the true estimate of the facts; and a
+recognition of the eternal destiny of Keats in the world of mind,
+coupled with the yearning of Shelley to have done with the vain shows of
+things in this cycle of mortality, and to be at one with Keats in the
+mansions of the everlasting. Such is the evolution of this Elegy; from
+mourning to rapture: from a purblind consideration of deathly phenomena
+to the illumination of the individual spirit which contemplates the
+eternity of spirit as the universal substance.
+
+Shelley raises in his poem a very marked contrast between the death of
+Adonais (Keats) as a mortal man succumbing to 'the common fate,' and the
+immortality of his spirit as a vital immaterial essence surviving the
+death of the body: he uses terms such as might be adopted by any
+believer in the doctrine of 'the immortality of the soul,' in the
+ordinary sense of that phrase. It would not however be safe to infer
+that Shelley, at the precise time when he wrote _Adonais_, was really in
+a more definite frame of mind on this theme than at other periods of his
+life, or of a radically different conviction. As a fact, his feelings on
+the great problems of immortality were acute, his opinions regarding
+them vague and unsettled. He certainly was not an adherent of the
+typical belief on this subject; the belief that a man on this earth is a
+combination of body and soul, in a state--his sole state--of
+'probation'; that, when the body dies and decays, the soul continues to
+be the same absolute individual identity; and that it passes into a
+condition of eternal and irreversible happiness or misery, according to
+the faith entertained or the deeds done in the body. His belief amounted
+more nearly to this: That a human soul is a portion of the Universal
+Soul, subjected, during its connexion with the body, to all the
+illusions, the dreams and nightmares, of sense; and that, after the
+death of the body, it continues to be a portion of the Universal Soul,
+liberated, from those illusions, and subsisting in some condition which
+the human reason is not capable of defining as a state either of
+personal consciousness or of absorption. And, so far as the human being
+exercised, during the earthly life, the authentic functions of soul,
+that same exercise of function continues to be the permanent record of
+the soul in the world of mind. If any reader thinks that this seems a
+vague form of belief, the answer is that the belief of Shelley was
+indeed a vague one. In the poem of _Adonais_ it remains, to my
+apprehension, as vague as in his other writings: but it assumes a shape
+of greater definition, because the poem is, by its scheme and intent, a
+personating poem, in which the soul of Keats has to be greeted by the
+soul of Chatterton, just as the body of Adonais has to be caressed and
+bewailed by Urania. Using language of a semi-emblematic kind, we might
+perhaps express something of Shelley's belief thus:--Mankind is the
+microcosm, as distinguished from the rest of the universe, which forms
+the macrocosm; and, as long as a man's body and soul remain in
+combination, his soul pertains to the microcosm: when this combination
+ceases with the death of the body, his soul, in whatever sense it may be
+held to exist, lapses into the macrocosm, but there is neither knowledge
+as to the mode of its existence, nor speech capable of recording this.
+
+As illustrating our poet's conceptions on these mysterious subjects, I
+append extracts from three of his prose writings. The first extract
+comes from his fragment _On Life_, which may have been written (but this
+is quite uncertain) towards 1815; the second from his fragment _On a
+Future State_, for which some similar date is suggested; the third from
+the notes to his drama of _Hellas_, written in 1821, later than
+_Adonais_.
+
+(1) 'The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of Life
+which, though startling to the apprehension, is in fact that which the
+habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It
+strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. I
+confess that I am one of those who am unable to refuse my assent[17] to
+the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but
+as it is perceived. It is a decision against which all our persuasions
+struggle--and we must be long convicted before we can be convinced that
+the solid universe of external things is "such stuff as dreams are made
+of." The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and
+matter, its fatal consequences in morals, and their [? the] violent
+dogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early conducted me to
+Materialism. This Materialism is a seducing system to young and
+superficial minds: it allows its disciples to talk, and dispenses them
+from thinking. But I was discontented with such a view of things as it
+afforded. Man is a being of high aspirations, "looking both before and
+after," whose "thoughts wander through eternity," disclaiming alliance
+with transcience and decay; incapable of imagining to himself
+annihilation; existing but in the future and the past; being, not what
+he is, but what he has been and shall be. Whatever may be his true and
+final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with
+nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and
+being. Each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to
+which all things are referred, and the line in which all things are
+contained. Such contemplations as these Materialism, and the popular
+philosophy of mind and matter, alike forbid: they are only consistent
+with the Intellectual System.... The view of Life presented by the most
+refined deductions of the Intellectual Philosophy is that of unity.
+Nothing exists but as it is perceived. The difference is merely nominal
+between those two classes of thought which are vulgarly distinguished by
+the names of "ideas" and of "external objects." Pursuing the same thread
+of reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds, similar to
+that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise
+found to be a delusion. The words "I, you, they," are not signs of any
+actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus
+indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different
+modifications of the one mind. Let it not be supposed that this doctrine
+conducts to the monstrous presumption that I, the person who now write
+and think, am that one mind. I am but a portion of it.'
+
+(2) 'Suppose however that the intellectual and vital principle differs
+in the most marked and essential manner from all other known substances;
+that they have all some resemblance between themselves which _it_ in no
+degree participates. In what manner can this concession be made an
+argument for its imperishability? All that we see or know perishes[18]
+and is changed. Life and thought differ indeed from everything else: but
+that it survives that period beyond which we have no experience of its
+existence such distinction and dissimilarity affords no shadow of proof,
+and nothing but our own desires could have led us to conjecture or
+imagine. Have we existed before birth? It is difficult to conceive the
+possibility of this.... If we have _not_ existed before birth; if, at
+the period when the parts of our nature on which thought and life depend
+seem to be woven together, they _are_ woven together; if there are no
+reasons to suppose that we have existed before that period at which our
+existence apparently commences; then there are no grounds for
+supposition that we shall continue to exist after our existence has
+apparently ceased. So far as thought and life is concerned, the same
+will take place with regard to us, individually considered, after death,
+as had place before our birth. It is said that it is possible that we
+should continue to exist in some mode totally inconceivable to us at
+present. This is a most unreasonable presumption.... Such assertions ...
+persuade indeed only those who desire to be persuaded. This desire to be
+for ever as we are--the reluctance to a violent and unexperienced change
+which is common to all the animated and inanimate combinations of the
+universe--is indeed the secret persuasion which has given birth to the
+opinions of a Future State.'
+
+(3. Note to the chorus, 'Worlds on worlds are rolling ever,' &c.) 'The
+first stanza contrasts the immortality of the living and thinking beings
+which inhabit the planets and (to use a common and inadequate phrase)
+clothe themselves in matter, with the transcience of the noblest
+manifestations of the external world. The concluding verses indicate a
+progressive state of more or less exalted existence, according to the
+degree of perfection which every distinct intelligence may have
+attained. Let it not be supposed that I mean to dogmatise upon a subject
+concerning which all men are equally ignorant, or that I think the
+Gordian knot of the origin of evil can be disentangled by that or any
+similar assertions.... That there is a true solution of the riddle, and
+that in our present state that solution is unattainable by us, are
+propositions which may be regarded as equally certain: meanwhile, as it
+is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt
+and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to have conjectured the
+condition of that futurity towards which we are all impelled by an
+inextinguishable thirst for immortality. Until better arguments can be
+produced than sophisms which disgrace the cause, this desire itself must
+remain the strongest and the only presumption that eternity is the
+inheritance of every thinking being.'
+
+The reader will perceive that in these three passages the dominant
+ideas, very briefly stated, are as follows:--(1) Mind is the aggregate
+of all individual minds; (2) man has no reason for expecting that his
+mind or soul will be immortal; (3) no reason, except such as inheres in
+the very desire which he feels for immortality. These opinions,
+deliberately expressed by Shelley at different dates as a theorist in
+prose, should be taken into account if we endeavour to estimate what he
+means when, as a poet, he speaks, whether in _Hellas_ or in _Adonais_,
+of an individual, his mind and his immortality. When Shelley calls upon
+us to regard Keats (Adonais) as mortal in body but immortal in soul or
+mind, his real intent is probably limited to this: that Keats has been
+liberated, by the death of the body, from the dominion and delusions of
+the senses; and that he, while in the flesh, developed certain fruits of
+mind which survive his body, and will continue to survive it
+indefinitely, and will form a permanent inheritance of thought and of
+beauty to succeeding generations. Keats himself, in one of his most
+famous lines, expressed a like conception,
+
+
+'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.'
+
+
+Shelley was faithful to his canons of highest literary or poetical form
+in giving a Greek shape to his elegy on Keats; but it may be allowed to
+his English readers, or at any rate to some of them, to think that he
+hereby fell into a certain degree of artificiality of structure,
+undesirable in itself, and more especially hampering him in a plain and
+self-consistent expression both of his real feeling concerning Keats,
+and of his resentment against those who had cut short, or were supposed
+to have cut short, the career and the poetical work of his friend.
+Moreover Shelley went beyond the mere recurrence to Greek forms of
+impersonation and expression: he took two particular Greek authors, and
+two particular Greek poems, as his principal model. These two poems are
+the Elegy of Bion on Adonis, and the Elegy of Moschus on Bion. To
+imitate is not to plagiarize; and Shelley cannot reasonably be called a
+plagiarist because he introduced into _Adonais_ passages which are
+paraphrased or even translated from Bion and Moschus. It does seem
+singular however that neither in the _Adonais_ volume nor in any of his
+numerous written remarks upon the poem does Shelley ever once refer to
+this state of the facts. Possibly in using the name 'Adonais' he
+intended to refer the reader indirectly to the 'Adonis' of Bion; and he
+prefixed to the preface of his poem, as a motto, four verses from the
+Elegy of Moschus upon Bion. This may have been intended for a hint to
+the reader as to the Grecian sources of the poem. The whole matter will
+receive detailed treatment in our next section, as well as in the Notes.
+
+The passages of _Adonais_ which can be traced back to Bion and Moschus
+are not the finest things in the poem: mostly they fill out its fabular
+'argument' with brilliancy and suavity, rather than with nerve and
+pathos. The finest things are to be found in the denunciation of the
+'deaf and viperous murderer;' in the stanzas concerning the 'Mountain
+Shepherds,' especially the figure representing Shelley himself; and in
+the solemn and majestic conclusion, where the poet rises from the region
+of earthly sorrow into the realm of ideal aspiration and contemplation.
+
+Shelley is generally--and I think most justly--regarded as a peculiarly
+melodious versifier: but it must not be supposed that he is rigidly
+exact in his use of rhyme. The contrary can be proved from the entire
+body of his poems. _Adonais_ is, in this respect, neither more nor less
+correct than his other writings. It would hardly be reasonable to
+attribute his laxity in rhyming to either carelessness, indifference, or
+unskilfulness: but rather to a deliberate preference for a certain
+variety in the rhyme-sounds--as tending to please the ear, and availing
+to satisfy it in the total effect, without cloying it by any tight-drawn
+uniformity. Such a preference can be justified on two grounds: firstly,
+that the general effect of the slightly varied sounds is really the more
+gratifying of the two methods, and I believe that, practised within
+reasonable limits, it is so; and secondly, that the requirements of
+sense are superior to those of sound, and that, in the effort after
+severely exact rhyming, a writer would often, be compelled to sacrifice
+some delicacy of thought, or some grace or propriety of diction. Looking
+through the stanzas of _Adonais_, I find the following laxities of
+rhyming: Compeers, dares; anew, knew (this repetition of an identical
+syllable as if it were a rhyme is very frequent with Shelley, who
+evidently considered it to be permissible, and even right--and in this
+view he has plenty of support): God; road; last, waste; taught, not;
+break, cheek (two instances); ground, moaned; both, youth; rise, arise;
+song, stung; steel, fell; light, delight; part, depart; wert, heart;
+wrong, tongue; brow, so; moan, one; crown, tone; song, unstrung; knife,
+grief; mourn, burn; dawn, moan; bear, bear; blot, thought; renown,
+Chatterton; thought, not; approved, reproved; forth, earth; nought, not;
+home, tomb; thither, together; wove, of; riven, heaven. These are 34
+instances of irregularity. The number of stanzas in _Adonais_ is 55:
+therefore there is more than one such irregularity for every two
+stanzas.
+
+It may not be absolutely futile if we bestow a little more attention
+upon the details of these laxities of rhyme. The repetition of an
+identical syllable has been cited 6 times. In 4 instances the sound of
+_taught_ is assimilated to that of _not_ (I take here no account of
+differences of spelling, but only of the sounds); in 4, the sound of
+_ground_ and of _renown_ to that of _moaned_, or of _Chatterton_; in 2,
+the sound of _o_ in _road, both_, and _wove_, to that in _God, youth_,
+and _of_; in 3, the sound of _song_ to that of _stung_; in 2, the sound
+of _ee_ in _compeers, steel, cheek_, and _grief_, to that in _dares,
+fell, break_ and _knife_; in 2, the sound of _e_ in _wert_ and _earth_
+to that in _heart_ and _forth_; in 3, the sound of _o_ in _moan_ and
+_home_ to that in _one, dawn_, and _tomb_; in 2, the sound of _thither_
+to that of _together_. The other cases which I have cited have only a
+single instance apiece. It results therefore that the vowel-sound
+subjected to the most frequent variations is that of _o_, whether single
+or in combination.
+
+Shelley may be considered to allow himself more than an average degree
+of latitude in rhyming: but it is a fact that, if the general body of
+English poetry is scrutinized, it will be found to be more or less lax
+in this matter. This question is complicated by another question--that
+of how words were pronounced at different periods in our literary
+history: in order to exclude the most serious consequent difficulties, I
+shall say nothing here about any poet prior to Milton. I take at
+haphazard four pages of rhymed verse from each of the following six
+poets, and the result proves to be as follows:--
+
+_Milton._--Pass, was; feast, rest; come, room; still, invisible;
+vouchsafe, safe; moon, whereon; ordained, land. 7 instances.
+
+_Dryden._--Alone, fruition; guard, heard; pursued, good: procured,
+secured, 4 instances.
+
+_Pope._--Given, heaven; steer, character; board, lord; fault, thought;
+err, singular. 5 instances.
+
+_Gray._--Beech, stretch; borne, thorn; abode, God; broke, rock, 4
+instances.
+
+_Coleridge._--Not a single instance.
+
+_Byron._--Given, heaven; Moore, yore; look, duke; song, tongue; knot,
+not; of, enough; bestowed, mood. 7 instances.
+
+In all these cases, as in that of Shelley's _Adonais_, I have taken no
+count of those instances of lax sound-rhyme which are correct
+letter-rhyme--such as the coupling of _move_ with _love_, or of _star_
+with _war_; for these, however much some more than commonly purist ears
+may demur to them, appear to be part and parcel of the rhyming system of
+the English language. I need hardly say that, if these cases had been
+included, my list would in every instance have swelled considerably; nor
+yet that I am conscious how extremely partial and accidental is the
+test, as to comparative number of laxities, which I have here supplied.
+
+The Spenserian metre, in which _Adonais_ is written, was used by Shelley
+in only one other instance--his long ideal epic _The Revolt of Islam_.
+
+
+
+
+BION AND MOSCHUS.
+
+
+The relation of Shelley's Elegy of _Adonais_ to the two Elegies written
+by Bion and by Moschus must no doubt have been observed, and been more
+or less remarked upon, as soon as _Adonais_ obtained some currency among
+classical readers; Captain Medwin, in his _Shelley Papers_, 1832,
+referred to it. I am not however aware that the resemblances had ever
+been brought out in detail until Mr. G.S.D. Murray, of Christ Church,
+Oxford, noted down the passages from Bion, which were published
+accordingly in my edition of Shelley's Poems, 1870. Since then, 1888,
+Lieut.-Colonel Hime, R.A., issued a pamphlet (Dulau & Co.) entitled _The
+Greek Materials of Shelley's Adonais, with Remarks on the three Great
+English Elegies_, entering into further, yet not exhaustive, particulars
+on the same subject. Shelley himself made a fragmentary translation from
+the Elegy of Bion on Adonis: it was first printed in Mr. Forman's
+edition of Shelley's Poems, 1877. I append here those passages which are
+directly related to _Adonais_:--
+
+
+'I mourn Adonis dead--loveliest Adonis--
+Dead, dead Adonis--and the Loves lament.
+Sleep no more, Venus, wrapped in purple woof--
+Wake, violet-stoled queen, and weave the crown
+Of death,--'tis Misery calls,--for he is dead.
+             ... Aphrodite
+With hair unbound is wandering through the woods,
+Wildered, ungirt, unsandalled--the thorns pierce
+Her hastening feet, and drink her sacred blood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The flowers are withered up with grief.
+       *       *       *       *       *
+Echo resounds, . . "Adonis dead!"
+       *       *       *       *       *
+She clasped him, and cried ... "Stay, Adonis!
+Stay, dearest one,...
+                    And mix my lips with thine!
+Wake yet a while, Adonis--oh but once!--
+That I may kiss thee now for the last time--
+But for as long as one short kiss may live!"
+
+
+The reader familiar with _Adonais_ will recognise the passages in that
+poem of which we here have the originals. To avoid repetition, I do not
+cite them at the moment, but shall call attention to them successively
+in my Notes at the end of the volume.
+
+For other passages, also utilised by Shelley, I have recourse to the
+volume of Mr. Andrew Lang (Macmillan & Co. 1889), _Theocritus, Bion, and
+Moschus, rendered into English Prose_. And first, from Bion's Elegy on
+Adonis:--
+
+'The flowers flush red for anguish.... This kiss will I treasure, even
+as thyself, Adonis, since, ah ill-fated! thou art fleeing me,... while
+wretched I yet live, being a goddess, and may not follow thee.
+Persephone, take thou my lover, my lord, for thyself art stronger than
+I, and all lovely things drift down to thee.... For why ah overbold!
+didst thou follow the chase, and, being so fair, why wert thou thus
+over-hardy to fight with beasts?... A tear the Paphian sheds for each
+blood-drop of Adonis, and tears and blood on the earth are turned to
+flowers.... Ah even in death he is beautiful, beautiful in death, as one
+that hath fallen on sleep.... All things have perished in his death, yea
+all the flowers are faded.... He reclines, the delicate Adonis, in his
+raiment of purple, and around him the Loves are weeping and groaning
+aloud, clipping their locks for Adonis. And one upon his shafts, another
+on his bow, is treading, and one hath loosed the sandal of Adonis, and
+another hath broken his own feathered quiver, and one in a golden vessel
+bears water, and another laves the wound, and another, from behind him,
+with his wings is fanning Adonis.... Thou must again bewail him, again
+must weep for him another year.... He does not heed them [the Muses];
+not that he is doth to hear, but that the Maiden of Hades doth not let
+him go.'
+
+The next-ensuing passages come from the Elegy of Moschus for Bion:--
+
+'Ye flowers, now in sad clusters breathe yourselves away. Now redden, ye
+roses, in your sorrow, and now wax red, ye wind-flowers; now, thou
+hyacinth, whisper the letters on thee graven, and add a deeper ai ai to
+thy petals: he is dead, the beautiful singer.... Ye nightingales that
+lament among the thick leaves of the trees, tell ye to the Sicilian
+waters of Arethusa the tidings that Bion the herdsman is dead.... Thy
+sudden doom, O Bion, Apollo himself lamented, and the Satyrs mourned
+thee, and the Priapi in sable raiment, and the Panes sorrow for thy
+song, and the Fountain-fairies in the wood made moan, and their tears
+turned to rivers of waters. And Echo in the rocks laments that thou art
+silent, and no more she mimics thy voice. And in sorrow for thy fall the
+trees cast down their fruit, and all the flowers have faded.... Nor ever
+sang so sweet the nightingale on the cliffs,... nor so much, by the grey
+sea-waves, did ever the sea-bird sing, nor so much in the dells of dawn
+did the bird of Memnon bewail the son of the Morning, fluttering around
+his tomb, as they lamented for Bion dead.... Echo, among the reeds, doth
+still feed upon thy songs.... This, O most musical of rivers, is thy
+second sorrow,--this, Meles, thy new woe. Of old didst thou lose
+Homer:... now again another son thou weepest, and in a new sorrow art
+thou wasting away.... Nor so much did pleasant Lesbos mourn for Alcaeus,
+nor did the Teian town so greatly bewail her poet,... and not for Sappho
+but still for thee doth Mitylene wail her musical lament.... Ah me! when
+the mallows wither in the garden, and the green parsley, and the curled
+tendrils of the anise, on a later day they live again, and spring In
+another year: but we men, we the great and mighty or wise, when once we
+have died, in hollow earth we sleep, gone down into silence.... Poison
+came, Bion, to thy mouth--thou didst know poison. To such lips as thine
+did it come, and was not sweetened? What mortal was so cruel that could
+mix poison for thee, or who could give thee the venom that heard thy
+voice? Surely he had no music in his soul,... But justice hath overtaken
+them all.'
+
+Bion was born in Smyrna, or in a neighbouring village named Phlossa, and
+may have died at some date not far from 250 B.C. The statement of
+Moschus that Bion was poisoned by certain enemies appears to be intended
+as an assertion of actual fact. Of Moschus nothing distinct is known,
+beyond his being a native of Sicily.
+
+
+
+
+ADONAIS;
+
+AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF JOHN KEATS,
+
+Author of _Endymion, Hyperion,_ etc.
+
+
+[Greek:
+
+Astaer prin men elampes eni zooisin eoos.
+Nun de thanon lampeis esperos en phthimenois.]
+
+PLATO.
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+[Greek:
+
+Pharmakon  aelthe Bion poti son stoma, pharmakon eides.
+Pos teu tois cheilessi potedrame kouk eglukanthae;
+Tis de Brotos tossouton anameros ae kerasai toi,
+Ae dounai laleonti to pharmakon; ekphugen odan.]
+
+MOSCHUS, EPITAPH. BION.
+
+
+It is my intention to subjoin to the London edition of this poem a
+criticism upon the claims of its lamented object to be classed among the
+writers of the highest genius who have adorned our age. 15 My known
+repugnance to the narrow principles of taste on which several of his
+earlier compositions were modelled proves at least that I am an
+impartial judge. I consider the fragment of _Hyperion_ as second to
+nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years. 20
+
+John Keats died at Rome of a consumption, in his twenty-fourth year, on
+the [23rd] of [February] 1821; and was buried in the romantic and lonely
+cemetery of the protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is the
+tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and
+desolate, which formed the circuit of 25 ancient Rome. The cemetery is
+an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and
+daisies. It might make one in love with death to think that one should
+be buried in so sweet a place.
+
+30 The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I have dedicated
+these unworthy verses was not less delicate and fragile than it was
+beautiful; and, where canker-worms abound, what wonder if its young
+flower was blighted in the bud? The savage criticism on his _Endymion_
+which appeared in the _Quarterly Review_ produced the 35 most violent
+effect on his susceptible mind. The agitation thus originated ended in
+the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued;
+and the succeeding acknowledgments, from more candid critics, of the
+true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus
+wantonly inflicted.
+
+40 It may be well said that these wretched men know not what they do.
+They scatter their insults and their slanders without heed as to whether
+the poisoned shaft lights on a heart made callous by many blows, or one,
+like Keats's, composed of more penetrable stuff. One of their associates
+is, to my knowledge, a most base and unprincipled 45 calumniator. As to
+_Endymion_, was it a poem, whatever might be its defects, to be treated
+contemptuously by those who had celebrated with various degrees of
+complacency and panegyric _Paris_, and _Woman_ and _A Syrian Tale_, and
+Mrs. Lefanu, and Mr. Barrett, and Mr. Howard Payne, and a long list of
+the illustrious 50 obscure? Are these the men who, in their venal
+good-nature, presumed to draw a parallel between the Rev. Mr. Milman and
+Lord Byron? What gnat did they strain at here, after having swallowed
+all those camels? Against what woman taken in adultery dares the
+foremost of these literary prostitutes to cast his opprobrious stone? 55
+Miserable man! you, one of the meanest, have wantonly defaced one of the
+noblest, specimens of the workmanship of God. Nor shall it be your
+excuse that, murderer as you are, you have spoken daggers, but used
+none.
+
+The circumstances of the closing scene of poor Keats's life were 60 not
+made known to me until the Elegy was ready for the press. I am given to
+understand that the wound which his sensitive spirit had received from
+the criticism of _Endymion_ was exasperated by the bitter sense of
+unrequited benefits; the poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the
+stage of life, no less by those on whom 65 he had wasted the promise of
+his genius than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care.
+He was accompanied to Rome, and attended in his last illness, by Mr.
+Severn, a young artist of the highest promise, who, I have been
+informed, 'almost risked his own life, and sacrificed every prospect to
+unwearied attendance upon his dying friend.' Had I known these
+circumstances before the completion 70 of my poem, I should have been
+tempted to add my feeble tribute of applause to the more solid
+recompense which the virtuous man finds in the recollection of his own
+motives. Mr. Severn can dispense with a reward from 'such stuff as
+dreams are made of.' His conduct is a golden augury of the success of
+his future career. 75 May the unextinguished spirit of his illustrious
+friend animate the creations of his pencil, and plead against oblivion
+for his name!
+
+
+
+
+ADONAIS.
+
+
+
+1.
+
+  I weep for Adonais--he is dead!
+    Oh weep for Adonais, though our tears
+  Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
+    And thou, sad Hour selected from all years
+    To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,        5
+  And teach them thine own sorrow! Say: 'With me
+    Died Adonais! Till the future dares
+  Forget the past, his fate and fame shall be
+An echo and a light unto eternity.'
+
+
+2.
+
+  Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay,
+    When thy son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies
+  In darkness? Where was lorn Urania
+    When Adonais died? With veilèd eyes,
+    'Mid listening Echoes, in her paradise                 5
+  She sate, while one, with soft enamoured breath,
+    Rekindled all the fading melodies
+  With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath,
+He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of Death.
+
+3.
+
+  Oh weep for Adonais--he is dead!
+    Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep!--
+  Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
+    Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep,
+    Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;           5
+  For he is gone where all things wise and fair
+    Descend. Oh dream not that the amorous deep
+  Will yet restore him to the vital air;
+Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.
+
+
+4.
+
+  Most musical of mourners, weep again!
+    Lament anew, Urania!--He died
+  Who was the sire of an immortal strain,
+    Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride
+    The priest, the slave, and the liberticide,          5
+  Trampled and mocked with many a loathèd rite
+    Of lust and blood. He went unterrified
+  Into the gulf of death; but his clear sprite
+Yet reigns o'er earth, the third among the Sons of Light.
+
+
+5.
+
+  Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
+    Not all to that bright station dared to climb:
+  And happier they their happiness who knew,
+    Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time
+    In which suns perished. Others more sublime,          5
+  Struck by the envious wrath of man or God,
+    Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime;
+  And some yet live, treading the thorny road
+Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame's serene abode.
+
+6.
+
+  But now thy youngest, dearest one has perished,
+    The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew,
+  Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished,
+    And fed with true love tears instead of dew.
+    Most musical of mourners, weep anew!              5
+  Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last,
+    The bloom whose petals, nipt before they blew,
+  Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste;
+The broken lily lies--the storm is overpast.
+
+
+7.
+
+  To that high Capital where kingly Death
+    Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay
+  He came; and bought, with price of purest breath,
+    A grave among the eternal.--Come away!
+    Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day        5
+  Is yet his fitting charnel-roof, while still
+    He lies as if in dewy sleep he lay.
+  Awake him not! surely he takes his fill
+Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.
+
+
+8.
+
+  He will awake no more, oh never more!
+    Within the twilight chamber spreads apace
+  The shadow of white Death, and at the door
+    Invisible Corruption waits to trace
+    His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place;        5
+  The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe
+    Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface
+  So fair a prey, till darkness and the law
+Of change shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain draw.
+
+9.
+
+  Oh weep for Adonais!--The quick Dreams,
+    The passion-wingèd ministers of thought,
+  Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams
+    Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught
+    The love which was its music, wander not--            5
+  Wander no more from kindling brain to brain,
+    But droop there whence they sprung; and mourn their lot
+  Round the cold heart where, after their sweet pain,
+They ne'er will gather strength or find a home again.
+
+
+10.
+
+  And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head,
+    And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries,
+  'Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead!
+    See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes,
+    Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies           5
+  A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain,'
+    Lost angel of a ruined paradise!
+  She knew not 'twas her own,--as with no stain
+She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.
+
+
+11.
+
+  One from a lucid urn of starry dew
+    Washed his light limbs, as if embalming them;
+  Another dipt her profuse locks, and threw
+    The wreath upon him, like an anadem
+    Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem;            5
+  Another in her wilful grief would break
+    Her bow and wingèd reeds, as if to stem
+  A greater loss with one which was more weak,
+And dull the barbèd fire against his frozen cheek.
+
+
+12.
+
+  Another Splendour on his mouth alit,
+    That mouth whence it was wont to draw the breath
+  Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit,
+    And pass into the panting heart beneath
+    With lightning and with music: the damp death      5
+  Quenched its caress upon his icy lips;
+    And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath
+  Of moonlight vapour which the cold night clips,
+It flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse.
+
+
+13.
+
+  And others came,--Desires and Adorations,
+    Wingèd Persuasions, and veiled Destinies,
+  Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering incarnations
+    Of Hopes and Fears, and twilight Phantasies;
+    And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,                5
+  And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
+    Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,
+  Came in slow pomp;--the moving pomp might seem
+Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.
+
+
+14.
+
+  All he had loved, and moulded into thought
+    From shape and hue and odour and sweet sound.
+  Lamented Adonais. Morning sought
+    Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound,
+    Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,      5
+  Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;
+    Afar the melancholy Thunder moaned,
+  Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,
+And the wild Winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.
+
+
+15.
+
+  Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,
+    And feeds her grief with his remembered lay,
+  And will no more reply to winds or fountains,
+    Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray,
+    Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day;        5
+  Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear
+    Than those for whose disdain she pined away
+  Into a shadow of all sounds:--a drear
+Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear.
+
+
+16.
+
+  Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down
+    Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,
+  Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown,
+    For whom should she have waked the sullen Year?
+    To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear,                5
+  Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both
+    Thou, Adonais; wan they stand and sere
+  Amid the faint companions of their youth,
+With dew all turned to tears,--odour, to sighing ruth.
+
+
+17.
+
+  Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale,
+    Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain;
+  Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale
+    Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain
+    Her mighty young with morning, doth complain,        5
+  Soaring and screaming round her empty nest,
+    As Albion wails for thee: the curse of Cain
+  Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast,
+And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest!
+
+
+18.
+
+  Ah woe is me! Winter is come and gone,
+    But grief returns with the revolving year.
+  The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;
+    The ants, the bees, the swallows, re-appear;
+    Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons' bier;    5
+  The amorous birds now pair in every brake,
+    And build their mossy homes in field and brere;
+  And the green lizard and the golden snake,
+Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.
+
+
+19.
+
+  Through wood and stream and field and hill and ocean,
+    A quickening life from the Earth's heart has burst,
+  As it has ever done, with change and motion,
+    From the great morning of the world when first
+    God dawned on chaos. In its steam immersed,              5
+  The lamps of heaven flash with a softer light;
+    All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst,
+  Diffuse themselves, and spend in love's delight
+The beauty and the joy of their renewèd might.
+
+
+20.
+
+  The leprous corpse, touched by this spirit tender,
+    Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath;
+  Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour
+    Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death,
+    And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath.              5
+  Nought we know dies: shall that alone which knows
+    Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
+  By sightless lightning? Th' intense atom glows
+A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.
+
+
+21.
+
+  Alas that all we loved of him should be,
+    But for our grief, as if it had not been,
+  And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!
+    Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene
+    The actors or spectators? Great and mean             5
+  Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow.
+    As long as skies are blue and fields are green,
+  Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
+Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.
+
+
+22.
+
+  _He_ will awake no more, oh never more!
+    'Wake thou,' cried Misery, 'childless Mother; Rise
+  Out of thy sleep, and slake in thy heart's core
+    A wound more fierce than his, with tears and sighs.'
+    And all the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes,       5
+  And all the Echoes whom their Sister's song
+    Had held in holy silence, cried 'Arise!'
+  Swift as a thought by the snake memory stung,
+From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendour sprung.
+
+
+23.
+
+  She rose like an autumnal Night that springs
+    Out of the east, and follows wild and drear
+  The golden Day, which on eternal wings,
+    Even as a ghost abandoning a bier,
+    Had left the Earth a corpse. Sorrow and fear         5
+  So struck, so roused, so rapt, Urania;
+    So saddened round her like an atmosphere
+  Of stormy mist; so swept her on her way,
+Even to the mournful place where Adonais lay.
+
+
+24.
+
+  Out of her secret paradise she sped,
+    Through camps and cities rough with stone and steel
+  And human hearts, which, to her aery tread
+    Yielding not, wounded the invisible
+    Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell.              5
+  And barbèd tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they,
+    Rent the soft form they never could repel,
+  Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May,
+Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way.
+
+
+25.
+
+  In the death-chamber for a moment Death,
+    Shamed by the presence of that living might,
+  Blushed to annihilation, and the breath
+    Revisited those lips, and life's pale light
+    Flashed through those limbs so late her dear delight.     5
+  'Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless,
+    As silent lightning leaves the starless night!
+  Leave me not!' cried Urania. Her distress
+Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress.
+
+
+26.
+
+  'Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again!
+    Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live!
+  And in my heartless breast and burning brain
+    That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive,
+    With food of saddest memory kept alive,                   5
+  Now thou art dead, as if it were a part
+    Of thee, my Adonais! I would give
+  All that I am, to be as thou now art:--
+But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart.
+
+
+27
+
+  'O gentle child, beautiful as thou wert,
+    Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men
+  Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart
+    Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?
+    Defenceless as thou wert, oh where was then            5
+  Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear?--
+    Or, hadst thou waited the full cycle when
+  Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere,
+The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer.
+
+
+28.
+
+  'The herded wolves bold only to pursue,
+    The obscene ravens clamorous o'er the dead,
+  The vultures to the conqueror's banner true,
+    Who feed where desolation first has fed,
+    And whose wings rain contagion,--how they fled,       5
+  When like Apollo, from his golden bow,
+    The Pythian of the age one arrow sped,
+  And smiled!--The spoilers tempt no second blow,
+They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.
+
+
+29.
+
+  'The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn:
+    He sets, and each ephemeral insect then
+  Is gathered into death without a dawn,
+    And the immortal stars awake again.
+    So is it in the world of living men:                  5
+  A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight
+    Making earth bare and veiling heaven; and, when
+  It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light
+Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's awful night.'
+
+
+30.
+
+  Thus ceased she: and the Mountain Shepherds came,
+    Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent.
+  The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
+    Over his living head like heaven is bent,
+    An early but enduring monument,                     5
+  Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
+    In sorrow. From her wilds Ierne sent
+  The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,
+And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue.
+
+
+31.
+
+  'Midst others of less note came one frail form,
+    A phantom among men, companionless
+  As the last cloud of an expiring storm
+    Whose thunder is its knell. He, as I guess,
+    Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness              5
+  Actaeon-like; and now he fled astray
+    With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
+  And his own thoughts along that rugged way
+Pursued like raging hounds their father and their prey.
+
+
+32.
+
+  A pard-like Spirit beautiful and swift--
+    A love in desolation masked--a power
+  Girt round with weakness; it can scarce uplift
+    The weight of the superincumbent hour.
+    It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,                5
+  A breaking billow;--even whilst we speak
+    Is it not broken? On the withering flower
+  The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
+The life can burn in blood even while the heart may break.
+
+
+33.
+
+  His head was bound with pansies overblown,
+    And faded violets, white and pied and blue;
+  And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,
+    Round whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew
+    Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew,          5
+  Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart
+    Shook the weak hand that grasped it. Of that crew
+  He came the last, neglected and apart;
+A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart.
+
+
+34.
+
+  All stood aloof, and at his partial moan
+    Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band
+  Who in another's fate now wept his own;
+    As in the accents of an unknown land
+    He sang new sorrow; sad Urania scanned               5
+  The Stranger's mien, and murmured 'Who art thou?'
+    He answered not, but with a sudden hand
+  Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow,
+Which was like Cain's or Christ's--Oh that it should be so!
+
+
+35.
+
+  What softer voice is hushed over the dead?
+    Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown?
+  What form leans sadly o'er the white death-bed,
+    In mockery of monumental stone,
+    The heavy heart heaving without a moan?              5
+  If it be he who, gentlest of the wise,
+    Taught, soothed, loved, honoured, the departed one.
+  Let me not vex with inharmonious sighs
+The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice.
+
+
+36.
+
+  Our Adonais has drunk poison--oh
+    What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
+  Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
+    The nameless worm would now itself disown;
+    It felt, yet could escape, the magic tone              5
+  Whose prelude held all envy, hate, and wrong,
+    But what was howling in one breast alone,
+  Silent with expectation of the song
+Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.
+
+
+37.
+
+  Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame!
+    Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me,
+  Thou noteless blot on a remembered name!
+    But be thyself, and know thyself to be!
+    And ever at thy season be thou free                    5
+  To spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow;
+    Remorse and self-contempt shall cling to thee,
+  Hot shame shall burn upon thy secret brow,
+And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt--as now.
+
+
+38.
+
+  Nor let us weep that our delight is fled
+    Far from these carrion kites that scream below.
+  He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
+    Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now.
+    Dust to the dust: but the pure spirit shall flow       5
+  Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
+    A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
+  Through time and change, unquenchably the same,
+Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame.
+
+
+39.
+
+  Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!
+    He hath awakened 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      5
+  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.
+
+
+40.
+
+  He has outsoared 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          5
+  He is secure; and now can never mourn
+    A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain--
+  Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
+With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
+
+
+41.
+
+  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!             5
+  Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains! and thou Air,
+    Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
+  O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
+Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!
+
+
+42.
+
+  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,          5
+  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.
+
+
+43.
+
+  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;              5
+  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.
+
+
+44.
+
+  The splendours of the firmament of time
+    May be eclipsed, but are extinguished 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           5
+  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.
+
+
+45.
+
+  The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
+    Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
+  Far in the unapparent. Chatterton
+    Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
+    Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought            5
+  And as he fell and as he lived and loved
+    Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot,
+  Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved;--
+Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.
+
+
+46.
+
+  And many more, whose names on earth are dark
+    But whose transmitted effluence cannot die
+  So long as fire outlives the parent spark,
+    Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
+    'Thou art become as one of us,' they cry;            5
+  'It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long
+    Swung blind in unascended majesty,
+  Silent alone amid an heaven of song.
+Assume thy wingèd throne, thou Vesper of our throng!'
+
+
+47.
+
+  Who mourns for Adonais? Oh come forth,
+    Fond wretch, and know thyself and him aright.
+  Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous earth;
+    As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light
+    Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might          5
+  Satiate the void circumference: then shrink
+    Even to a point within our day and night;
+  And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink
+When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.
+
+
+48.
+
+  Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre,
+    Oh not of him, but of our joy. 'Tis nought
+  That ages, empires, and religions, there
+    Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought;
+    For such as he can lend--they borrow not            5
+  Glory from those who made the world their prey:
+    And he is gathered to the kings of thought
+  Who waged contention with their time's decay,
+And of the past are all that cannot pass away.
+
+
+49.
+
+  Go thou to Rome,--at once the paradise,
+    The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
+  And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
+    And flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress
+    The bones of Desolation's nakedness,                 5
+  Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead
+    Thy footsteps to a slope of green access,
+  Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead
+A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread.
+
+
+50.
+
+  And grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time
+    Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;
+  And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,
+    Pavilioning the dust of him who planned
+    This refuge for his memory, doth stand               5
+  Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath
+    A field is spread, on which a newer band
+  Have pitched in heaven's smile their camp of death,
+Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.
+
+
+51.
+
+  Here pause. These graves are all too young as yet
+    To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned
+  Its charge to each; and, if the seal is set
+    Here on one fountain of a mourning mind,
+    Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find        5
+  Thine own well full, if thou returnest home,
+    Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind
+  Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
+What Adonais is why fear we to become?
+
+
+52.
+
+  The One remains, the many change and pass;
+    Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
+  Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
+    Stains the white radiance of eternity,
+    Until Death tramples it to fragments.--Die,          5
+  If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
+    Follow where all is fled!--Rome's azure sky,
+  Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
+The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
+
+
+53.
+
+  Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my heart?
+    Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
+  They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
+    A light is past from the revolving year,
+    And man and woman; and what still is dear            5
+  Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
+    The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near:
+  'Tis Adonais calls! Oh hasten thither!
+No more let life divide what death can join together.
+
+
+54.
+
+  That light whose smile kindles the universe,
+    That beauty in which all things work and move,
+  That benediction which the eclipsing curse
+    Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
+    Which, through the web of being blindly wove         5
+  By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
+    Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
+  The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
+Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
+
+
+55.
+
+  The breath whose might I have invoked in song
+    Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven
+  Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
+    Whose sails were never to the tempest given.
+    The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!         5
+  I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar!
+    Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
+  The soul of Adonais, like a star,
+Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
+
+
+
+
+
+CANCELLED PASSAGES OF ADONAIS,
+
+AND OF ITS PREFACE.
+
+
+The expression of my indignation and sympathy. I will allow myself a
+first and last word on the subject of calumny as it relates to me. As an
+author I have dared and invited censure. If I understand myself, I have
+written neither for profit nor for fame: I have employed my poetical
+compositions and publications simply as the instruments of that sympathy
+between myself and others which the ardent and unbounded love I
+cherished for my kind incited me to acquire. I expected all sorts of
+stupidity and insolent contempt from those.... These compositions
+(excepting the tragedy of _The Cenci_, which was written rather to try
+my powers than to unburden my full heart) are insufficiently....
+Commendation then perhaps they deserve, even from their bitterest
+enemies; but they have not obtained any corresponding popularity. As a
+man, I shrink from notice and regard: the ebb and flow of the world
+vexes me: I desire to be left in peace. Persecution, contumely, and
+calumny, have been heaped upon me in profuse measure; and domestic
+conspiracy and legal oppression have violated in my person the most
+sacred rights of nature and humanity. The bigot will say it was the
+recompense of my errors--the man of the world will call it the result of
+my imprudence: but never upon one head....
+
+Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant
+race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an
+unsuccessful author turns critic. But a young spirit panting for fame,
+doubtful of its powers, and certain only of its aspirations, is
+ill-qualified to assign its true value to the sneer of this world. He
+knows not that such stuff as this is of the abortive and monstrous
+births which time consumes as fast as it produces. He sees the truth and
+falsehood, the merits and demerits, of his case, inextricably
+entangled.... No personal offence should have drawn from me this public
+comment upon such stuff.
+
+The offence of this poor victim seems to have consisted solely in his
+intimacy with Leigh Hunt, Mr. Hazlitt, and some other enemies of
+despotism and superstition. My friend Hunt has a very hard skull to
+crack, and will take a deal of killing. I do not know much of Mr.
+Hazlitt, but....
+
+I knew personally but little of Keats; but, on the news of his
+situation, I wrote to him, suggesting the propriety of trying the
+Italian climate, and inviting him to join me. Unfortunately he did not
+allow me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+1.
+
+  And the green paradise which western waves
+    Embosom in their ever-wailing sweep,--
+  Talking of freedom to their tongueless caves,
+    Or to the spirits which within them keep
+    A record of the wrongs which, though they sleep,       5
+  Die not, but dream of retribution,--heard
+    His hymns, and echoing them from steep to steep,
+  Kept--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+2.
+
+  And ever as he went he swept a lyre
+    Of unaccustomed shape, and ... strings
+  Now like the ... of impetuous fire
+    Which shakes the forest with its murmurings,
+    Now like the rush of the aërial wings                  5
+  Of the enamoured wind among the treen,
+    Whispering unimaginable things,
+  And dying on the streams of dew serene
+Which feed the unmown meads with ever-during green.
+
+3.
+
+  And then came one of sweet and earnest looks,
+    Whose soft smiles to his dark and night-like eyes
+  Were as the clear and ever-living brooks
+    Are to the obscure fountains whence they rise,
+    Showing how pure they are: a paradise                  5
+  Of happy truth upon his forehead low
+    Lay, making wisdom lovely, in the guise
+  Of earth-awakening morn upon the brow
+Of star-deserted heaven while ocean gleams below.
+
+
+4.
+
+  His song, though very sweet, was low and faint,
+    A simple strain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+5.
+
+      A mighty Phantasm, half concealed
+    In darkness of his own exceeding light,
+  Which clothed his awful presence unrevealed,
+    Charioted on the ... night
+    Of thunder-smoke, whose skirts were chrysolite.       5
+
+
+6.
+
+  And like a sudden meteor which outstrips
+    The splendour-wingèd chariot of the sun,
+                                   ... eclipse
+    The armies of the golden stars, each one
+    Pavilioned in its tent of light--all strewn           5
+  Over the chasms of blue night--
+
+
+
+
+
+NOTES.
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+Line 1. _Adonais_. There is nothing to show positively why Shelley
+adopted the name Adonais as a suitable Hellenic name for John Keats. I
+have already suggested (p. 59) that he may perhaps have wished to
+indicate, in this indirect way, that his poem was founded partly upon
+the Elegy of Bion for Adonis. I believe the name Adonais was not really
+in use among the Greeks, and is not anywhere traceable in classical
+Grecian literature. It has sometimes been regarded as a Doricized form
+of the name Adonis: Mr. William Cory says that it is not this, but would
+properly be a female form of the same name. Dr. Furnivall has suggested
+to me that Adonais is 'Shelley's variant of Adonias, the women's yearly
+mourning for Adonis.' Disregarding details, we may perhaps say that the
+whole subject of his Elegy is treated by Shelley as a transposition of
+the lament, as conceived by Bion, of the Cyprian Aphrodite for Adonis;
+and that, as he changes the Cyprian into the Uranian Aphrodite, so he
+changes the dead youth from Adonis into Adonais.
+
+1. 4. _Motto from the poet Plato_. This motto has been translated
+by Shelley himself as follows:
+
+'Thou wert the morning star among the living,
+  Ere thy fair light had fled:--
+Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
+  New splendour to the dead.'
+
+
+1. 8. _Motto from Moschus_. Translated on p. 66, 'Poison came, Bion,'
+&c.
+
+1. 13. _It is my intention to subjoin to the London edition of this poem
+a criticism_, &c. As to the non-fulfilment of this intention see p. 31.
+
+1. 16. _My known repugnance ... proves at least_. In the Pisa edition
+the word is printed 'prove' (not 'proves'). Shelley was far from being
+an exact writer in matters of this sort.
+
+1. 21. _John Keats died ... in his twenty-fourth year, on the [23rd] of
+[February]_ 1821. Keats, at the time of his death, was not really in his
+twenty-fourth, but in his twenty-sixth year: the date of his birth was
+31 October, 1795. In the Pisa edition of _Adonais_ the date of death is
+given thus--'the----of----1821': for Shelley, when he wrote his preface,
+had no precise knowledge of the facts. In some later editions, 'the 27th
+of December 1820' was erroneously substituted. Shelley's mistake in
+supposing that Keats, in 1821, was aged only twenty-three, may be taken
+into account in estimating his previous observation, 'I consider the
+fragment of _Hyperion_ as second to nothing that was ever produced by a
+writer of the same years.' Keats, writing in August, 1820, had told
+Shelley (see p. 17) that some of his poems, perhaps including
+_Hyperion_, had been written 'above two years' preceding that date. If
+Shelley supposed that Keats was twenty-three years old at the beginning
+of 1821, and that _Hyperion_ had been written fully two years prior to
+August, 1820, he must have accounted that poem to be the product of a
+youth of twenty, or at most twenty-one, which would indeed be a
+marvellous instance of precocity. As a matter of fact, _Hyperion_ was
+written by Keats when in his twenty-fourth year. This diminishes the
+marvel, but does not make Shelley's comment on the poem any the less
+correct.
+
+1. 22. _Was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the
+Protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of
+Cestius._ As to the burial of the ashes of Shelley himself in a separate
+portion of the same cemetery, see p. 23. Shelley lies nearer than Keats
+to the pyramid of C. Cestius.
+
+1. 33. _The savage criticism on his_ Endymion _which appeared in the_
+Quarterly Review. As to this matter see the prefatory Memoirs of Shelley
+and of Keats, and especially, at p. 39 &c., a transcript of the
+criticism.
+
+1. 35. _The agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood
+vessel in the lungs._ See pp. 27 and 37, The _Quarterly_ critique was
+published in September 1818, and the first rupture of a blood-vessel
+occurred in February 1820. Whether the mortification felt by Keats at
+the critique was small (as is now generally opined) or great (as Shelley
+thought), it cannot reasonably be propounded that this caused, or
+resulted in, the rupture of the pulmonary blood-vessel. Keats belonged
+to a consumptive family; his mother died of consumption, and also his
+younger brother: and the preliminaries of his mortal illness (even if we
+do not date them farther back, for which some reason appears) began
+towards the middle of July 1818, when, in very rough walking in the
+Island of Mull, he caught a severe and persistent attack of sore throat.
+
+1. 37. _The succeeding acknowledgments, from more candid critics, of the
+true greatness of his powers._ The notice here principally referred to
+is probably that which appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_ in August
+1820, written by Lord Jeffrey.
+
+1. 42. _Whether the poisoned shaft lights on a heart made callous by
+many blows._ Shelley, in this expression, has no doubt himself in view.
+He had had serious reason for complaining of the treatment meted out to
+him by the _Quarterly Review_: see the opening (partially cited at p.
+17) of his draft-letter to the Editor.
+
+1. 44. _One of their associates is, to my knowledge, a most base and
+unprincipled calumniator._ Shelley here refers to the writer of the
+critique in the _Quarterly Review_ of his poem _Laon and Cythna (The
+Revolt of Islam)_. At first he supposed the writer to be Southey;
+afterwards, the Rev. Mr. (Dean) Milman. His indignant phrase is
+therefore levelled at Milman. But Shelley was mistaken, for the article
+was in fact written by Mr. (afterwards Judge) Coleridge.
+
+1. 46. _Those who had celebrated with various degrees of complacency and
+panegyric_ Paris, _and_ Woman, _and_ A Syrian Tale, _and Mrs. Lefanu,
+and Mr. Barrett, and Mr. Howard Payne._ I presume that most readers of
+the present day are in the same position as I was myself--that of
+knowing nothing about these performances and their authors. In order to
+understand Shelley's allusion, I looked up the _Quarterly Review_ from
+April 1817 to April 1821, and have ascertained as follows, (1) The
+_Quarterly_ of April 1817 contains a notice of _Paris in 1815, a Poem_.
+The author's name is not given, nor do I know it. The poem, numbering
+about a thousand lines, is in the Spenserian stanza, varied by the
+heroic metre, and perhaps by some other rhythms. Numerous extracts are
+given, sufficient to show that the poem is at any rate a creditable
+piece of writing. Some of the critical dicta are the following:--'The
+work of a powerful and poetic imagination.... The subject of the poem is
+a desultory walk through Paris, in which the author observes, with very
+little regularity but--with great force, on the different objects which
+present themselves.... Sketching with the hand of a master.... In a
+strain of poetry and pathos which we have seldom seen equalled.... An
+admirable mirable poet.' (2) _Woman_ is a poem by the Mr. Barrett whom
+Shelley names, termed on the title-page 'the Author of _The Heroine._'
+It was noticed in the _Quarterly_ for April 1818, the very same number
+which contained the sneering critique of _Endymion_. This poem is
+written in the heroic metre; and the extracts given do certainly
+comprise some telling and felicitous lines. Such are--
+
+
+'The beautiful rebuke that looks surprise.
+The gentle vengeance of averted eyes;'
+
+
+also (a line which has borne, and may yet bear, frequent re-quoting)
+
+
+'Last at his cross, and earliest at his grave.'
+
+
+For critical utterances we have the ensuing:--'A strain of patriotism
+pure, ardent, and even sublime.... Versification combining conciseness
+and strength with a considerable degree of harmony.... Both talent and
+genius.... Some passages of it, and those not a few, are of the first
+order of the pathetic and descriptive.' (3) _A Syrian Tale._ Of this
+book I have failed to find any trace in the _Quarterly Review_, or in
+the Catalogue of the British Museum. (4) Mrs. Lefanu. Neither can I
+trace this lady in the _Quarterly_. Mrs. Alicia Lefanu, who is stated to
+have been a sister of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and also her daughter,
+Miss Alicia Lefanu, published books during the lifetime of Shelley. The
+former printed _The Flowers, a Fairy Tale_, 1810, and _The Sons of Erin,
+a Comedy_, 1812. To the latter various works are assigned, such as
+_Rosard's Chain, a Poem_. (5) Mr. John Howard Payne was author of
+_Brutus, or the Fall of Tarquin, an Historical Tragedy_, criticized in
+the _Quarterly_ for April, 1820. I cannot understand why Shelley should
+have supposed this criticism to be laudatory: it is in fact unmixed
+censure. As thus:--'He appears to us to have no one quality which we
+should require in a tragic poet.... We cannot find in the whole play a
+single character finely conceived or rightly sustained, a single
+incident well managed, a single speech--nay a single sentence--of good
+poetry.' It is true that the same article which reviews Payne's _Brutus_
+notices also, and with more indulgence, Sheil's _Evadne_: possibly
+Shelley glanced at the article very cursorily, and fancied that any
+eulogistic phrases which he found in it applied to Payne.
+
+1. 51. _A parallel between the Rev. Mr. Milman and Lord Byron._ I have
+not succeeded in finding this parallel. The _Quarterly_ _Review_ for
+July 1818 contains a critique of Milman's poem, _Samor, Lord of the
+Bright City_; and the number for May 1820, a critique of Milman's _Fall
+of Jerusalem_. Neither of these notices draws any parallel such as
+Shelley speaks of.
+
+1. 52. _What gnat did they strain at here_. The word 'here' will be
+perceived to mean 'in _Endymion_,' or 'in reference to _Endymion_'; but
+it is rather far separated from its right antecedent.
+
+1. 59. _The circumstances of the closing scene of poor Keats's life were
+not made known to me until the Elegy was ready for the press_. See p.
+22.
+
+1. 63. _The poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of
+life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius
+than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care_. This
+statement of Shelley is certainly founded upon a passage in the letter
+(see p. 22) addressed by Colonel Finch to Mr. Gisborne. Colonel Finch
+said that Keats had reached Italy, 'nursing a deeply rooted disgust to
+life and to the world, owing to having been infamously treated by the
+very persons whom his generosity had rescued from want and woe.' The
+Colonel's statement seems (as I have previously intimated) to be rather
+haphazard; and Shelley's recast of it goes to a further extreme.
+
+1. 68. _'Almost risked his own life'_ &c. The substance of the words in
+inverted commas is contained in Colonel Finch's letter, but Shelley does
+not cite verbatim.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
++Stanza 1,+ 1. 1. _I weep for Adonais--he is dead._ Modelled on the
+opening of Bion's Elegy for Adonis. See p. 63.
+
+1. 3. _The frost which binds so dear a head_: sc. the frost of death.
+
+11. 4, 5. _And thou, sad Hour,... rouse thy obscure compeers._ The
+compeers are clearly the other Hours. Why they should be termed
+'obscure' is not quite manifest. Perhaps Shelley means that the weal or
+woe attaching to these Hours is obscure or uncertain; or perhaps that
+they are comparatively obscure, undistinguished, as not being marked by
+any such conspicuous event as the death of Adonais.
+
+11. 8, 9. _His fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto
+eternity._ By 'eternity' we may here understand, not absolute eternity
+as contradistinguished from time, but an indefinite space of time, the
+years and the centuries. His fate and fame shall be echoed on from age
+to age, and shall be a light thereto.
+
++Stanza 2,+ 1. 1. _Where wert thou, mighty Mother._ Aphrodite Urania.
+See pp. 51, 52. Shelley constantly uses the form 'wert' instead
+of 'wast.' This phrase may be modelled upon two lines near the
+opening of Milton's _Lycidas_--
+
+'Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep
+Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?'
+
+
+1. 2. _The shaft which flies In darkness._ As Adonis was mortally
+wounded by a boar's tusk, so (it is here represented) was Adonais slain
+by an insidiously or murderously launched dart: see p. 49. The allusion
+is to the truculent attack made upon Keats by the _Quarterly Review_. It
+is true that 'the shaft which flies in darkness' might be understood in
+merely a general sense, as the mysterious and unforeseen arrow of Death:
+but I think it clear that Shelley used the phrase in a more special
+sense.
+
+1. 4. _With veiled eyes_, &c. Urania is represented as seated in her
+paradise (pleasure-ground, garden-bower), with veiled eyes--
+downward-lidded, as in slumber: an Echo chaunts or recites the
+'melodies,' or poems, which Adonais had composed while Death was rapidly
+advancing towards him: Urania is surrounded by other Echoes, who
+hearken, and repeat the strain. A hostile reviewer might have been
+expected to indulge in one of the most familiar of cheap jokes, and to
+say that Urania had naturally fallen asleep over Keats's poems: but I am
+not aware that any critic of _Adonais_ did actually say this. The
+phrase, 'one with soft enamoured breath,' means 'one of the Echoes';
+this is shown in stanza 22, 'all the Echoes whom _their sister's song_.'
+
++Stanza 3,+ 11. 6, 7. _For he is gone where all things wise and fair
+Descend._ Founded on Bion (p. 64), 'Persephone,... all lovely things
+drift down to thee.'
+
+1. 7, _The amorous deep._ The depth of earth, or region of the dead;
+amorous, because, having once obtained possession of Adonais, it retains
+him in a close embrace, and will not restore him to the land of the
+living. This passage has a certain analogy to that of Bion (p. 65), 'Not
+that he is loth to hear, but that the maiden of Hades will not let him
+go.'
+
++Stanza 4,+ 1. 1. _Most musical of mourners._ This phrase, applying to
+Urania, is one of those which might seem to favour the assumption that
+the deity here spoken of is the Muse Urania, and not Aphrodite Urania,
+But on this point see pp. 50 to 52.
+
+1. 1. _Weep again._ The poem seems to indicate that Urania, slumbering,
+is not yet aware of the death of Adonais. Therefore she cannot as yet
+have wept for his death: but she may have wept in anticipation that he
+would shortly die, and thus can be now adjured to 'weep _again_.' (See
+also p. 143.)
+
+1. 2. _He died._ Milton.
+
+1. 4. _When his country's pride,_ &c. Construe: When the priest,
+the slave, and the liberticide, trampled his country's pride, and
+mocked [it] with many a loathèd rite of lust and blood. This of
+course refers to the condition of public affairs and of court-life in
+the reign of Charles II. The inversion in this passage is not a
+very serious one, although, for the sense, slightly embarrassing.
+Occasionally Shelley conceded to himself great latitude in inversion:
+as for instance in the _Revolt of Islam_, canto 3, st. 34,
+
+'And the swift boat the little waves which bore
+Were cut by its keen keel, though slantingly,'
+
+which means 'And the little waves, which bore the swift boat,
+were cut,' &c.; also in the _Ode to Naples_, strophe 4,
+
+      'Florence, beneath the sun,
+      Of cities fairest one,
+Blushes within her bower for Freedom's expectation.'
+
+
+1. 8. _His clear sprite._ To substitute the word 'sprite' for 'spirit,'
+in an elevated passage referring to Milton, appears to me one of the
+least tolerable instances of make-rhyme in the whole range of English
+poetry. 'Sprite' is a trivial and distorted misformation of 'spirit';
+and can only, I apprehend, be used with some propriety (at any rate, in
+modern poetry) in a more or less bantering sense. The tricksy elf Puck
+may be a sprite, or even the fantastic creation Ariel; but neither
+Milton's Satan nor Milton's Ithuriel, nor surely Milton himself, could
+possibly be a sprite, while the limits of language and of common sense
+are observed.
+
+1. 9. _The third among the Sons of Light._ At first sight this phrase
+might seem to mean 'the third-greatest poet of the world': in which case
+one might suppose Homer and Shakespear to be ranked as the first and
+second. But it may be regarded as tolerably clear that Shelley is here
+thinking only of _epic_ poets; and that he ranges the epic poets
+according to a criterion of his own, which is thus expressed in his
+_Defence of Poetry_ (written in the same year as _Adonais_, 1821):
+'Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet; that is, the second
+poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible
+relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which
+he lived, and of the ages which followed it--developing itself in
+correspondence with their development....Milton was the third epic
+poet.' The poets whom Shelley admired most were probably Homer,
+Aeschylus, Sophocles, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespear, and Milton; he took
+high delight in the _Book of Job_, and presumably in some other poetical
+books of the Old Testament; Calderon also he prized greatly; and in his
+own time Goethe, Byron, and (on some grounds) Wordsworth and Coleridge.
+
++Stanza 5,+ 1. 2. _Not all to that bright station dared to climb._ The
+conception embodied in the diction of this stanza is not quite so clear
+as might be wished. The first statement seems to amount to this--That
+some poets, true poets though they were, did not aspire so high, nor
+were capable of reaching so high, as Homer, Dante, and Milton, the
+typical epic poets. A statement so obviously true that it hardly
+extends, in itself, beyond a truism. But it must be read as introductory
+to what follows.
+
+1. 3. _And happier they their happiness who knew._ Clearly a recast
+of the phrase of Vergil,
+
+'O fortunati nimium sua si bona nôrint
+Agricolae.'
+
+But Vergil speaks of men who did not adequately appreciate their own
+happiness; Shelley (apparently) of others who did so. He seems to
+intimate that the poetical temperament is a happy one, in the case of
+those poets who, unconcerned with the greatest ideas and the most
+arduous schemes of work, pour forth their 'native wood-notes wild.' I
+think it possible however that Shelley intended, his phrase to be
+accepted with the same meaning as Vergil's--'happier they, supposing
+they had known their happiness.' In that case, the only reason implied
+why these minor poets were the happier is that their works have endured
+the longer.
+
+11. 4, 5. _Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time In which
+suns perished._ Shelley here appears to say that the minor poets have
+left works which survive, while some of the works of the very greatest
+poets have disappeared: as, for instance, his own lyrical models in
+_Adonais_, Bion and Moschus, are still known by their writings, while
+many of the master-pieces of Aeschylus and Sophocles are lost. Some
+_tapers_ continue to burn; while some _suns_ have perished.
+
+11. 5-7. _Others more sublime, Struck by the envious wrath of man or
+God, Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime._ These others include
+Keats (Adonais) himself, to whom the phrase, 'struck by the envious
+wrath of man,' may be understood as more peculiarly appropriated. And
+generally the 'others' may be regarded as nearly identical with 'the
+inheritors of unfulfilled renown' who appear (some of them pointed out
+by name) in stanza 45. The word God is printed in the Pisan edition with
+a capital letter: it may be questioned whether Shelley meant to indicate
+anything more definite than 'some higher power--Fate.'
+
+11. 8, 9. _And some yet live, treading the thorny road Which leads,
+through toil and hate, to Fame's serene abode._ Byron must be supposed
+to be the foremost among these; also Wordsworth and Coleridge; and
+doubtless Shelley himself should not he omitted.
+
++Stanza 6,+ 1. 2. _The nursling of thy widowhood._ As to this expression
+see p. 51. I was there speaking only of the Muse Urania; but the
+observations are equally applicable to Aphrodite Urania, and I am unable
+to carry the argument any further.
+
+11. 3, 4. _Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished, And fed
+with true love tears instead of dew._ It seems sufficiently clear that
+Shelley is here glancing at a leading incident in Keats's poem of
+_Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, founded upon a story in Boccaccio's
+_Decameron_. Isabella unburies her murdered lover Lorenzo;
+preserves his head in a pot of basil; and (as expressed in st. 52
+of the poem)
+
+'Hung over her sweet basil evermore,
+And moistened it with tears unto the core.'
+
+I give Shelley's words 'true love tears' as they appear in the
+Pisan edition: 'true-love tears' might be preferable.
+
+1. 9. _The broken lily lies--the storm is overpast._ As much as to say:
+the storm came, and shattered the lily; the storm has now passed away,
+but the lily will never revive.
+
++Stanza 7,+ 1. i. _To that high Capital where kingly Death_, &c. The
+Capital is Rome (where Keats died). Death is figured as the King of
+Rome, who there 'keeps his pale court in beauty and decay,'--amid the
+beauties of nature and art, and amid the decay of monuments and
+institutions.
+
+11. 3, 4. _And bought, with price of purest breath, A grave among the
+eternal._ Keats, dying in Rome, secured sepulture among the many
+illustrious persons who are there buried. This seems to be the only
+meaning of 'the eternal' in the present passage: the term does not
+directly imply (what is sufficiently enforced elsewhere) Keats's own
+poetic immortality.
+
+1. 4. _Come away!_ This call is addressed in fancy to any persons
+present in the chamber of death. They remain indefinite both to the poet
+and to the reader. The conclusion of the stanza, worded with great
+beauty and delicacy, amounts substantially to saying--'Take your last
+look of the dead Adonais while he may still seem to the eye to be rather
+sleeping than dead.'
+
+1. 7. _He lies as if in dewy sleep he lay._ See Bion (p. 64), 'Beautiful
+in death, as one that hath fallen on sleep.' The term 'dewy sleep' means
+probably 'sleep which refreshes the body as nightly dew refreshes the
+fields.' This phrase is followed by the kindred expression 'liquid
+rest.'
+
++Stanza 8,+ 1. 3. _The shadow of white Death_, &c. The use of 'his' and
+'her' in this stanza is not wholly free from ambiguity. In st. 7 Death
+was a male impersonation--'kingly Death' who 'keeps his pale court.' It
+may be assumed that he is the same in the present stanza. Corruption, on
+the other hand, is a female impersonation: she (not Death) must be the
+same as 'the eternal Hunger,' as to whom it is said that 'pity and awe
+soothe _her_ pale rage.' Premising this, we read:--'Within the twilight
+chamber spreads apace the shadow of white Death, and at the door
+invisible Corruption waits to trace his [Adonais's] extreme way to her
+[Corruption's] dim dwelling-place; the eternal Hunger [Corruption] sits
+[at the door], but pity and awe soothe her pale rage, nor dares she,'
+&c. The unwonted phrase 'his extreme way' seems to differ in meaning
+little if at all from the very ordinary term 'his last journey.' The
+statement in this stanza therefore is that corruption does not assail
+Adonais lying on his deathbed; but will shortly follow his remains to
+the grave, the dim [obscure, lightless] abode of corruption itself.
+
+11. 8, 9. _Till darkness and the law Of change shall o'er his sleep the
+mortal curtain draw._ Until the darkness of the grave and the universal
+law of change and dissolution shall draw the curtain of death over his
+sleep--shall prove his apparent sleep to be veritable death. The
+prolonged interchange in _Adonais_ between the ideas of death and of
+sleep may remind us that Shelley opened with a similar contrast or
+approximation his first considerable (though in part immature) poem
+_Queen Mab_--
+
+
+'How wonderful is Death,--
+Death, and his brother Sleep!' &c.
+
+
+The mind may also revert to the noble passage in Byron's _Giaour_--
+
+
+'He who hath bent him o'er the dead
+Ere the first day of death is fled,' &c.--
+
+
+though the idea of actual sleep is not raised in this admirably
+beautiful and admirably realistic description. Perhaps the poem, of all
+others, in which the conception of death is associated with that of
+sleep with the most poignant pathos, is that of Edgar Poe entitled _For
+Annie_--
+
+
+'Thank Heaven, the crisis,
+  The danger, is past,
+And the lingering illness
+  Is over at last,
+And the fever called living
+  Is conquered at last,' &c.--
+
+
+where real death is spoken of throughout, in a series of exquisite and
+thrilling images, as being real sleep. In Shelley's own edition of
+_Adonais_, the lines which we are now considering are essentially
+different. They run
+
+
+              'Till darkness and the law
+Of mortal change shall fill the grave which is her maw.'
+
+
+This is comparatively poor and rude. The change to the present reading
+was introduced by Mrs. Shelley in her edition of Shelley's Poems in
+1839. She gives no information as to her authority: but there can be no
+doubt that at some time or other Shelley himself made the improvement.
+See p. 33.
+
++Stanza 9,+ 1. i. _The quick Dreams._ With these words begins a passage
+of some length, which is closely modelled upon the passage of Bion (p.
+64), 'And around him the Loves are weeping,' &c.: modelled upon it, and
+also systematically transposed from it. The transposition goes on the
+same lines as that of Adonis into Adonais, and of the Cyprian into the
+Uranian Aphrodite; i.e. the personal or fleshly Loves are spiritualized
+into Dreams (musings, reveries, conceptions) and other faculties or
+emotions of the mind. It is to be observed, moreover, that the trance of
+Adonis attended by Cupids forms an incident in Keats's own poem of
+_Endymion_, book ii--
+
+
+'For on a silken couch of rosy pride,
+In midst of all, there lay a sleeping youth
+Of fondest beauty; fonder, in fair sooth,
+Than sighs could fathom or contentment reach.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+                         ... Hard by
+Stood serene Cupids, watching silently.
+One, kneeling to a lyre, touched the strings,
+Muffling to death the pathos with his wings,
+And ever and anon uprose to look
+At the youth's slumber; while another took
+A willow-bough distilling odorous dew,
+And shoot it on his hair; another flew
+In through the woven roof, and fluttering-wise
+Rained violets upon his sleeping eyes.'
+
+
+1. 2. _The passion-winged ministers of thought._ The 'Dreams' are here
+defined as being thoughts (or ministers of thought) winged with passion;
+not mere abstract cogitations, but thoughts warm with the heart's blood,
+emotional conceptions--such thoughts as subserve the purposes of poetry,
+and enter into its structure: in a word, poetic thoughts.
+
+1. 3. _Who were his flocks_, &c. These Dreams were in fact the very
+thoughts of Adonais, as conveyed in his poems. He being dead, they
+cannot assume new forms of beauty in any future poems, and cannot be
+thus diffused from mind to mind, but they remain mourning round their
+deceased herdsman, or master. It is possible that this image of a flock
+and a herdsman is consequent upon the phrase in the Elegy of Moschus for
+Bion--'Bion the herdsman is dead' (p. 65).
+
++Stanza 10,+ 1. 2. _And fans him with her moonlight wings._ See Bion (p.
+65), 'and another, from behind him, with his wings is fanning Adonis.'
+The epithet 'moonlight' may indicate either delicacy of colour, or faint
+luminosity--rather the latter,
+
+1. 6. _A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain._ I follow
+Shelley's edition in printing Dream with a capital letter. I do not
+however think this helpful to the right sense. The capitalized Dream
+might appear to be one of those impersonated Dreams to whom these
+stanzas relate: but in the present line the word 'dream' would be more
+naturally construed as meaning simply 'thought, mental conception.'
+
+1. 7. _Lost angel of a ruined paradise._ The ruined paradise is the
+mind, now torpid in death, of Adonais. The 'Dream' which has been
+speaking is a lost angel of this paradise, in the sense of being a
+messenger or denizen of the mind of Adonais, incapacitated for
+exercising any further action: indeed, the Dream forthwith fades, and is
+for ever extinct.
+
+1. 8. _With no stain._ Leaving no trace behind. The rhyme has entailed
+the use of the word 'stain,' which is otherwise a little arbitrary in
+this connexion.
+
+1. 9. _She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain._ A rain-cloud
+which has fully discharged its rain would no longer constitute a
+cloud--it would be dispersed and gone. The image is therefore a very
+exact one for the Dream which, having accomplished its function and its
+life, now ceases to be. There appears to be a further parallel
+intended--between the Dream whose existence closes in a _tear_, and the
+rain-cloud which has discharged its _rain_: this is of less moment, and
+verges upon a conceit. This passage in _Adonais_ is not without some
+analogy to one in Keats's _Endymion_ (quoted on p. 42)--
+
+
+                       'Therein
+A melancholy spirit well might win
+Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine
+Into the winds.'
+
+
+Stanza 11+ 11. 1, 2. _One from a lucid urn of starry dew Washed his
+light limbs, as if embalming them._ See the passage from Bion (p. 64),
+'One in a golden vessel bears water, and another laves the wound.' The
+expression 'starry dew' is rather peculiar: the dew may originally have
+'starred' the grass, but, when collected into an urn, it must have lost
+this property: perhaps we should rather understand, nocturnal dew upon
+which the stars had been shining. It is difficult to see how the act of
+washing the limbs could simulate the process of embalming.
+
+1. 3. _Another clipt her profuse locks._ See Bion (p. 64), 'clipping
+their locks for Adonis.' 'Profuse' is here accented on the first
+syllable; although indeed the line can be read with the accent, as is
+usual, on the second syllable.
+
+11. 3-5. _And threw The wreath upon him like an anadem Which frozen
+tears instead of pearls begem._ The wreath is the lock of hair--perhaps
+a plait or curl, for otherwise the term wreath is rather wide of the
+mark. The idea that the tears shed by this Dream herself (or perhaps
+other Dreams) upon the lock are 'frozen,' and thus stand in lieu of
+pearls upon an anadem or circlet, seems strained, and indeed
+incongruous: one might wish it away.
+
+11. 6, 7. _Another in her wilful grief would break Her bow and wingèd
+reeds._ Follows Bion closely--'And one upon his shafts, another on his
+bow, is treading' (p. 64). This is perfectly appropriate for the Loves,
+or Cupids: not equally so for the Dreams, for it is not so apparent what
+concern they have with bows and arrows. These may however be 'winged
+thoughts' or 'winged words'--[Greek: epea pteroenta]. Mr. Andrew Lang
+observes (Introduction to his Theocritus volume), 'In one or other of
+the sixteen Pompeian pictures of Venus and Adonis, the Loves are
+breaking their bows and arrows for grief, as in the hymn of Bion.'
+
+11. 7, 8. _As if to stem A greater loss with one which was more weak._
+'To stem a loss' is a very lax phrase--and more especially 'to stem a
+loss with another loss.' 'To stem a torrent--or, the current of a
+river,' is a well-known expression, indicating one sort of material
+force in opposition to another. Hence we come to the figurative
+expression, 'to stem the torrent of his grief,' &c. Shelley seems to
+have yielded to a certain analogy in the sentiment, and also to the
+convenience of a rhyme, and thus to have permitted himself a phrase
+which is neither English nor consistent with sense. Line 8 seems to me
+extremely feeble throughout.
+
+1. 9. _And dull the barbèd fire against his frozen cheek._ The
+construction runs--'Another would break, &c., and [would] dull, &c.' The
+term 'the barbèd fire' represents of course 'the winged reeds,' or
+arrows: actual reeds or arrows are now transmuted into flame-tipped
+arrows (conformable to the spiritual or immaterial quality of the
+Dreams): the fire is to be quenched against the frost of the death-cold
+cheek of Adonais. 'Frozen tears--frozen cheek:' Shelley would scarcely,
+I apprehend, have allowed this repetition, but for some inadvertence. I
+am free to acknowledge that I think the whole of this stanza bad. Its
+_raison d'être_ is a figurative but perfectly appropriate and
+straightforward passage in Bion: Shelley has attempted to turn that into
+a still more figurative passage suitable for _Adonais_, with a result
+anything but happy. He fails to make it either straightforward or
+appropriate, and declines into the super-subtle or wiredrawn.
+
++Stanza 12,+ 1. 1. _Another Splendour._ Another luminous Dream.
+
+1. 2. _That mouth whence it was wont to draw the breath,_ &c. Adonais
+(Keats), as a poet, is here figured as if he were a singer; consequently
+we are referred to his 'mouth' as the vehicle of his thoughts or poetic
+imaginings--not to his hand which recorded them.
+
+1. 3. _To pierce the guarded wit._ To obtain entry into the otherwise
+unready minds of others--the hearers (or readers) of the poet.
+
+11. 5, 6. _The damp death Quenched its caress upon his icy lips._ This
+phrase is not very clear. I understand it to mean--The damps of death
+[upon the visage of Adonais] quenched the caress of the Splendour [or
+Dream] imprinted on his icy lips. It might however be contended that the
+term 'the damp death' is used as an energetic synonym for the
+'Splendour' itself. In this case the sense of the whole passage may be
+amplified thus: The Splendour, in imprinting its caress upon the icy
+lips of Adonais, had its caress quenched by the cold, and was itself
+converted into dampness and deathliness: it was no longer a luminous
+Splendour, but a vaporous and clammy form of death. The assumption that
+'the damp death' stands as a synonym for the 'Splendour' obtains some
+confirmation from the succeeding phrase about the '_dying_ meteor'--for
+this certainly seems used as a simile for the 'Splendour.'
+
+1. 7. _'And, as a dying meteor,'_ &c. The dying meteor, in this simile,
+must represent the Splendour; the wreath of moonlight vapour stands for
+the pale limbs of Adonais; the cold night may in a general way symbolize
+the night of death.
+
+1. 9. _It flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse._
+The Splendour flushed through the limbs of Adonais, and so became
+eclipsed,--faded into nothingness. This terminates the episode of the
+'quick Dreams,' beginning with stanza 9.
+
++Stanza 13,+ 1. 1. _And others came,--Desires and Adorations,_ &c. This
+passage is the first in which Shelley has direct recourse, no longer to
+the Elegy of Bion for Adonis, but to the Elegy of Moschus for Bion. As
+he had spiritualized the impersonations of Bion, so he now spiritualizes
+those of Moschus. The Sicilian lyrist gives us (see p. 65) Apollo,
+Satyrs, Priapi, Panes, and Fountain-fairies. Shelley gives us Desires,
+Adorations, Persuasions, Destinies, Splendours, Glooms, Hopes, Fears,
+Phantasies, Sorrow, Sighs, and Pleasure. All these 'lament Adonais'
+(stanza 14): they are such emotional or abstract beings as 'he had
+loved, and moulded into thought from shape and hue and odour and sweet
+sound.' The adjectival epithets are worth noting for their poetic
+felicity: wingèd Persuasions (again hinting at [Greek: epea pteroenta]),
+veiled Destinies, glimmering Hopes and Fears, twilight Phantasies.
+
+1. 6. _And Pleasure, blind with tears_, &c. The Rev. Stopford Brooke, in
+an eloquent Lecture delivered to the Shelley Society in June, 1889,
+dwelt at some length upon the singular mythopoeic gift of the poet.
+These two lines are an instance in point, of a very condensed kind.
+Pleasure, heart-struck at the death of Adonais, has abrogated her own
+nature, and has become blinded with tears; her eyes can therefore serve
+no longer to guide her steps. Her smile too is dying, but not yet dead;
+it emits a faint gleam which, in default of eyes, serves to distinguish
+the path. If one regards this as a mere image, it may be allowed to
+approach close to a conceit; but it suggests a series of incidents and
+figurative details which may rather count as a compendious myth.
+
+1. 8. _Came in slow pomp:--the moving pomp might seem._ The repetition
+of the word 'pomp' gives a certain poverty to the sound of this line; it
+can hardly, I think, have been deliberately intended. In other respects
+this stanza is one of the most melodious in the poem.
+
++Stanza 14+, 11. 3, 4. _Morning sought Her eastern watch-tower, and her
+hair unbound_, &c. Whether Shelley wished the reader to attribute any
+distinct naturalistic meaning to the 'hair' of Morning is a question
+which may admit of some doubt. If he did so, the 'hair unbound' is
+probably to be regarded as streaks of rain-cloud; these cloudlets ought
+to fertilize the soil with their moisture; but, instead of that, they
+merely dim the eyes of Morning, and dull the beginnings of day. In this
+instance, and in many other instances ensuing, Shelley represents
+natural powers or natural objects--morning, echo, flowers, &c.--as
+suffering some interruption or decay of essence or function, in sympathy
+with the stroke which has cut short the life of Adonais. It need hardly
+be said that, in doing this, he only follows a host of predecessors. He
+follows, for example, his special models Bion and Moschus. They probably
+followed earlier models; but I have failed in attempting to trace how
+far back beyond them this scheme of symbolism may have extended;
+something of it can be found in Theocritus. The legend--doubtless a very
+ancient one--that the sisters of Phaeton wept amber for his fall belongs
+to the same order of ideas (as a learned friend suggests to me).
+
+1. 8. _Pale Ocean_. As not only the real Keats, but also the figurative
+Adonais, died in Rome, the ocean cannot be a feature in the immediate
+scene; it lies in the not very remote distance, felt rather than visible
+to sight. Of course too, Ocean (as well as Thunder and Winds) is
+personated in this passage; he is a cosmic deity, lying pale in unquiet
+slumber.
+
++Stanza 15+, 1. 1. _Lost Echo sits_, &c. Echo is introduced into both
+the Grecian elegies, that of Moschus as well as that of Bion. Bion (p.
+64) simply says that 'Echo resounds, "Adonis dead!"' But Moschus (p.
+65), whom Shelley substantially follows, sets forth that 'Echo in the
+rocks laments that thou [Bion] art silent, and no more she mimics thy
+voice'; also, 'Echo, among the reeds, doth still feed upon thy songs.'
+It will be observed that in this stanza Echo is a single personage--the
+Nymph known to mythological fable: but in stanza 2 we had various
+'Echoes,' spirits of minor account, who, in the paradise of Urania, were
+occupied with the poems of Adonais.
+
+11. 6-8. _His lips, more dear Than those for whose disdain she pined
+away Into a shadow of all sounds._ Echo is, in mythology, a Nymph who
+was in love with Narcissus. He, being enamoured of his own beautiful
+countenance, paid no heed to Echo, who consequently 'pined away into a
+shadow of all sounds.' In this expression one may discern a delicate
+double meaning. (1) Echo pined away into (as the accustomed phrase goes)
+'a mere shadow of her former self.' (2) Just as a solid body, lighted by
+the sun, casts, as a necessary concomitant, a shadow of itself, so a
+sound, emitted under the requisite conditions, casts an echo of itself;
+echo is, in relation to sound, the same sort of thing as shadow in
+relation to substance.
+
+11. 8, 9. _A drear Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen
+hear._ Echo will not now repeat the songs of the woodmen; she merely
+murmurs some snatches of the 'remembered lay' of Adonais.
+
++Stanza 16+, 1. 1. _Grief made the young Spring wild._ This introduction
+of Spring may be taken as implying that Shelley supposed Keats to have
+died in the Spring: but in fact he died in the Winter--23 February. As
+to this point see pp. 30 and 96.
+
+11. 1-3. _And she threw down Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,
+Or they dead leaves._ This corresponds to a certain extent with the
+phrases in Bion, 'the flowers are withered up with grief,' and 'yea all
+the flowers are faded' (p. 64); and in Moschus, 'and in sorrow for thy
+fall the trees cast down their fruit, and all the flowers have faded'
+(p. 65). It may be worth observing that Shelley says--'As if she Autumn
+were, _or_ they dead leaves' (not '_and_ they dead leaves'). He
+therefore seems to present the act of Spring from two separate points of
+view: (1) She threw down the buds, as if she had been Autumn, whose
+office it is to throw down, and not to cherish and develope; (2) she
+threw down the buds as if they had been, not buds of the nascent year,
+but such dead leaves of the olden year as still linger on the spray when
+Spring arrives,
+
+1. 4. _For whom should she have waked the sullen Year?_ The year,
+beginning on 1 January, may in a certain sense be conceived as sleeping
+until roused by the call of Spring. But more probably Shelley here
+treats the year as beginning on 25 March--which date would witness its
+awakening, and practically its first existence.
+
+11. 5-7. _To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear, Nor to himself Narcissus,
+as to both Thou, Adonais; wan they stand and sere_, &c. This passage
+assimilates two sections in the Elegy of Moschus, p. 65: 'Now, thou
+hyacinth, whisper the letters on thee graven, and add a deeper ai ai to
+thy petals: he is dead, the beautiful singer.... Nor so much did
+pleasant Lesbos mourn for Alcaeus,' &c. The passage of Shelley is rather
+complicated in its significance, because it mixes up the personages
+Hyacinthus and Narcissus with the flowers hyacinth and narcissus. The
+beautiful youth Hyacinthus was dear to Phoebus; on his untimely death
+(he was slain by a quoit which Phoebus threw, and which the jealous
+Zephyrus blew aside so that it struck Hyacinthus on the head), the god
+changed his blood into the flower hyacinth, which bears markings
+interpreted by the Grecian fancy into the lettering [Greek: ai ai]
+(alas, alas!). The beautiful youth Narcissus, contemplating himself in a
+streamlet, became enamoured of his own face; and pining away, was
+converted into the flower narcissus. This accounts for the lines, 'To
+Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear, nor to himself Narcissus.' But, when
+we come to the sequence, 'as to both thou, Adonais.' we have to do, no
+longer with the youths Hyacinthus and Narcissus, but with the flowers
+hyacinth and narcissus: it is the flowers which (according to Shelley)
+loved Adonais better than the youths were loved, the one by Phoebus and
+the other by himself. These flowers--being some of the kindling buds
+which Spring had thrown down--stand 'wan and sere.' (This last point is
+rather the reverse of a phrase in Bion's Elegy, p. 64, 'The flowers
+flush red for anguish.') It may perhaps be held that the transition from
+the youths to the flowers, and from the emotions of Phoebus and of
+Narcissus to those assigned to the flowers, is not very happily managed
+by Shelley: it is artificial, and not free from confusion. As to the
+hyacinth, the reader will readily perceive that a flower which bears
+markings read off into [Greek: ai ai] (or [Greek: AI AI] seems more
+correct) cannot be the same which we now call hyacinth. Ovid says that
+in form the hyacinth resembles a lily, and that its colour is
+'purpureus,' or deep red. John Martyn, who published in 1755 _The
+Georgicks of Virgil with an English Translation_, has an elaborate note
+on the subject. He concludes thus: 'I am pretty well satisfied that the
+flower celebrated by the poets is what we now are acquainted with under
+the name 'Lilium floribus reflexis,' or Martagon, and perhaps may be
+that very species which we call Imperial Martagon. The flowers of most
+sorts of martagons have many spots of a deeper colour: and sometimes I
+have seen these spots run together in such a manner as to form the
+letters AI in several places.' Shelley refers to the hyacinth in another
+passage (_Prometheus Unbound_, act 2, sc. 1) which seems to indicate
+that he regarded the antique hyacinth as being the same as the modern
+hyacinth,--
+
+
+                   'As the _blue bells_
+Of hyacinth tell Apollo's written grief.'
+
+
+1. 8. _Amid the faint companions of their youth._ In Shelley's edition
+the words are 'Amid the drooping comrades,' &c. The change was made
+under the same circumstances as noted on p. 105. Whether it is a change
+for the better may admit of some question. The faint companions of the
+youth of the hyacinth and the narcissus must be other flowers, such as
+Spring had thrown down.
+
+1. 9. _With dew all turned to tears,--odour, to sighing ruth._ The dew
+upon the hyacinth and narcissus is converted into tears: they exhale
+sighs, instead of fragrance. All this is in rather a _falsetto_ tone. It
+has some resemblance to the more simple and touching phrase in the Elegy
+by Moschus (p. 65): 'Ye flowers, now in sad clusters breathe yourselves
+away.'
+
++Stanza 17+, 1. 1. _Thy spirits sister, the lorn nightingale, Mourns not
+her mate_, &c. The reason for calling the nightingale the sister of the
+spirit of Keats (Adonais) does not perhaps go beyond this--that, as
+the nightingale is a supreme songster among birds, so was Keats a
+supreme songster among men. It is possible however--and one
+willingly supposes so--that Shelley singled out the nightingale for
+mention, in recognition of the consummate beauty of Keats's _Ode to
+the Nightingale_, published in the same volume with _Hyperion_. The
+epithet 'lorn' may also be noted in the same connexion; as Keats's
+Ode terminates with a celebrated passage in which 'forlorn' is the
+leading word (but not as an epithet for the nightingale itself)--
+
+'Forlorn!--the very word is as a knell,' &c.
+
+The nightingale is also introduced into the Elegy of Moschus for
+Bion; 'Ye nightingales that lament,' &c. (p. 65), and 'Nor
+ever sang so sweet the nightingale on the cliffs.' Poets are
+fond of speaking of the nightingale as being the hen-bird, and
+Shelley follows this precedent. It is a fallacy, for the songster
+is always the cock-bird.
+
+1. 3. _Not so the eagle_, &c. The general statement in these lines is
+that Albion wails for the death of Keats more melodiously than the
+nightingale mourning for her lost mate, and more passionately than the
+eagle robbed of her young. This statement has proved true enough in the
+long run: when Shelley wrote, it was only prospectively or potentially
+true, for the death of Keats excited no immediate widespread concern in
+England. It should be observed that, by introducing Albion as a
+figurative personage in his Elegy, Shelley disregards his emblematic
+Grecian youth Adonais, and goes straight to the actual Englishman Keats.
+This passage, taken as a whole, is related to that of Moschus (p. 65)
+regarding the nightingale, the sea-bird, and the bird of Memnon; see
+also the passage, 'and not for Sappho, but still for thee,' &c.
+
+11. 4, 5. _Could nourish in the sun's domain Her mighty youth with
+morning._ This phrase seems to have some analogy to that of Milton in
+his _Areopagitica_: 'Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant
+nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her
+invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle muing her mighty youth,
+and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam--purging and
+unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly
+radiance.'
+
+11. 7, 8. _The curse of Cain Light on his head_, &c. An imprecation
+against the critic of Keats's _Endymion_ in the _Quarterly Review_: see
+especially p. 39, &c. The curse of Cain was that he should be 'a
+fugitive and a vagabond,' as well as unsuccessful in tilling the soil.
+Shelley probably pays no attention to these details, but simply means
+'the curse of murder.'
+
++Stanza 18,+ 11. 1, 2. _Ah woe is me! Winter is come and gone, But grief
+returns with the revolving year_, &c. See the passage in Moschus (p.
+65): 'Ah me! when the mallows wither,' &c. The phrase in Bion has also a
+certain but restricted analogy to this stanza: 'Thou must again bewail
+him, again must weep for him another year' (p. 65). As to the phrase
+'Winter is come and gone,' see the note (p. 111) on 'Grief made the
+young Spring wild.'
+
+1. 5. _Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons' bier._ This
+phrase is barely consistent with the statement (st. 16) as to Spring
+throwing down her kindling buds. Perhaps, moreover, it was an error of
+print to give 'Seasons' in the plural: 'Season's' (meaning winter) would
+seem more accurate. A somewhat similar idea is conveyed in one of
+Shelley's lyrics, _Autumn, a Dirge_, written in 1820:--
+
+
+               'And the Year
+On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
+                Is lying.'
+
+
+1. 7. _Brere._ An antiquated form of the word briar.
+
+1. 9. _Like unimprisoned flames._ Flames which, after being pent up
+within some substance or space, finally find a vent.
+
++Stanza 19,+ 1. 2. _A quickening life_, &c. The present stanza is
+generally descriptive of the effects of Springtime upon the earth. This
+reawakening of Nature (Shelley says) has always taken place, in annual
+recurrence, since 'the great morning of the world when first God dawned
+on chaos.' This last expression must be construed with a certain
+latitude. The change from an imagined chaos into a divinely-ordered
+cosmos is not necessarily coincident with the interchange of seasons,
+and especially the transition from Winter to Spring, upon the planet
+Earth. All that can be safely propounded on such a subject is that the
+sequence of seasons is a constant and infallible phenomenon of Nature in
+that condition of our planet with which alone we have, or can have, any
+acquaintance.
+
+1. 5. _In its steam immersed_: i.e. in the steam--or vapour or
+exhalation--of the 'quickening life.'
+
++Stanza 20,+ 11. 1, 2. _The leprous corpse, touched by this spirit
+tender, Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath._ 'This spirit
+tender' is the 'quickening life' of the renascent year; or briefly the
+Spring. By 'the leprous corpse' Shelley may mean, not the corpse of an
+actual leper, but any corpse in a loathsome state of decay. Even so
+abhorrent an object avails to fertilize the soil, and thus promotes the
+growth of odorous flowers.
+
+1. 3. _Like incarnations of the stars_, &c. These flowers--star-like
+blossoms--illumine death and the grave: the light which would belong to
+them as stars is converted into the fragrance proper to them as flowers.
+This image is rather confused, and I think rather stilted: moreover,
+'incarnation' (or embodiment in _flesh_) is hardly the right word for
+the vegetative nature of flowers. As forms of life, the flowers mock or
+deride the grave-worm which battens or makes merry on corruption. The
+appropriateness of the term 'merry worm' seems very disputable.
+
+1. 6. _Nought we know dies._ This affirmation springs directly out
+of the consideration just presented to us--that even the leprous
+corpse does not, through various stages of decay, pass into absolute
+nothingness: on the contrary, its constituents take new forms,
+and subserve a re-growth of life, as in the flowers which bedeck
+the grave. From this single and impressive instance the poet
+passes to the general and unfailing law--No material object of
+which we have cognizance really dies: all such objects are in a
+perpetual cycle of change. This conception has been finely
+developed in a brace of early poems of Lord Tennyson, _All Things
+will Die_, and _Nothing will Die_:--
+
+'The stream will cease to flow,
+The wind will cease to blow,
+The clouds will cease to fleet,
+The heart will cease to beat--
+  For all things must die.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    'The stream flows,
+    The wind blows,
+    The cloud fleets,
+    The heart beats,
+    Nothing will die.
+    Nothing will die;
+    All things will change
+    Through eternity.'
+
+
+11. 6-8. _Shall that alone which knows Be as a sword consumed before the
+sheath By sightless lightning?_ From the axiom 'Nought we know dies'--an
+axiom which should be understood as limited to what we call material
+objects (which Shelley however considered to be indistinguishable, in
+essence, from ideas, see p, 56)--he proceeds to the question, 'Shall
+that alone which knows'--i.e. shall the mind alone--die and be
+annihilated? If the mind were to die, while the body continues extant
+(not indeed in the form of a human body, but in various phases of
+ulterior development), then the mind would resemble a sword which, by
+the action of lightning, is consumed (molten, dissolved) within its
+sheath, while the sheath itself remains unconsumed. This is put as a
+question, and Shelley does not supply an answer to it here, though the
+terms in which his enquiry is couched seem intended to suggest a reply
+to the effect that the mind shall _not_ die. The meaning of the epithet
+'sightless,' as applied to lightning, seems disputable. Of course the
+primary sense of this word is 'not-seeing, blind'; but Shelley would
+probably not have scrupled to use it in the sense of 'unseen.' I incline
+to suppose that Shelley means 'unseen'; not so much that the lightning
+is itself unseen as that its action in fusing the sword, which remains
+concealed within the sheath, is unseen. But the more obvious sense of
+'blind, unregardful,' could also be justified.
+
+11. 8, 9. _Th' intense atom glows A moment, then is quenched in a most
+cold repose._ The term 'th' intense atom' is a synonym for 'that which
+knows,' or the mind. By death it is 'quenched in a most cold repose':
+but the repose is not necessarily extinction.
+
++Stanza 21,+ 11. 1, 2. _Alas that all we loved of him should be, But for
+our grief, as if it had not been._ 'All we loved of him' must be the
+mind and character--the mental and personal endowments--of Adonais: his
+bodily frame is little or not at all in question here. By these lines
+therefore Shelley seems to intimate that the mind or soul of Adonais is
+indeed now and for ever extinct: it lives no longer save in the grief of
+the survivors. But it does not follow that this is a final expression of
+Shelley's conviction on the subject: the passage should be read as in
+context with the whole poem.
+
+11. 5, 6. _Great and mean Meet massed in death, who lends what life must
+borrow._ The meaning of the last words is far from clear to me. I think
+Shelley may intend to say that, in this our mortal state, death is the
+solid and permanent fact; it is rather a world of death than of life.
+The phenomena of life are but like a transitory loan from the great
+emporium, death. Shelley no doubt wanted a rhyme for 'morrow' and
+'sorrow': he has made use of 'borrow' in a compact but not perspicuous
+phrase.
+
++Stanza 22,+ 1. 2. _'Wake thou,' cried Misery, 'childless mother!'_
+We here return to Urania, of whom we had last heard in st. 6. See
+the passage translated by Shelley from Bion (p. 63), 'Sleep no
+more, Venus:... 'tis Misery calls,' &c.; but here the phrase,
+''Tis Misery calls,' is Shelley's own. He more than once introduces
+Misery (in the sense of Unhappiness, Tribulation) as an
+emblematic personage. There is his lyric named _Misery_, written
+in 1818, which begins--
+
+'Come, be happy,--sit by me,
+Shadow-vested Misery:
+Coy, unwilling, silent bride,
+Mourning in thy robe of pride,
+Desolation deified.'
+
+There is also the briefer lyric named _Death_, 1817, which begins--
+
+'They die--the dead return not. Misery
+Sits near an open grave, and calls them over,
+A youth with hoary hair and haggard eye.'
+
+
+11. 3, 4. _'Slake in thy hearts core A wound--more fierce than his, with
+tears and sighs.'_ Construe: Slake with tears and sighs a wound in thy
+heart's core--a wound more fierce than his.' See (p. 101) the remarks,
+apposite to st. 4, upon the use of inversion by Shelley.
+
+1. 5. _All the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes._ We had not hitherto
+heard of 'Dreams' in connexion with Urania, but only in connexion with
+Adonais himself. These 'Dreams that watched Urania's eyes' appear to be
+dreams in the more obvious sense of that word-visions which had haunted
+the slumbers of Urania.
+
+1. 8. _Swift as a thought by the snake memory stung._ The context
+suggests that the 'thought' here in question is a grievous thought, and
+the term 'the snake memory' conveys therefore a corresponding impression
+of pain. Shelley however had not the usual feeling of repulsion or
+abhorrence for snakes and serpents. Various passages could be cited to
+prove this; more especially Canto 1 of _The Revolt of Islam,_ where the
+Spirit of Good is figured under the form of a serpent.
+
+1. 9. _Front her ambrosial rest the fading Splendour sprung._ Urania.
+She is in her own nature a splendour, or celestial deity: at the present
+moment her brightness is 'fading,' as being overcast by sorrow and
+dismay. 'Her ambrosial rest' does not appear to signify anything more
+precise than 'her rest, proper to an immortal being.' The forms 'sprung,
+sung,' &c. are constantly used by Shelley instead of 'sprang, sang,' &c.
+
++Stanza 23,+ 1. 5. _Had left the Earth a corpse._ Shelley, in this
+quasi-Greek poem, takes no count of the fact that the sun, when it
+ceases to illumine one part of the earth, is shining upon another part.
+He treats the unillumined part as if it were the whole earth--which has
+hereby become 'a corpse.'
+
++Stanza 24,+ 1. 2, _Through camps and cities_, &c. In highly figurative
+language, this stanza pictures the passage of Urania from 'her secret
+paradise' to the death-chamber of Adonais in Rome, as if the spiritual
+essence and external form of the goddess were wounded by the uncongenial
+atmosphere of human malice and detraction through which she has to pass.
+The whole description is spiritualized from that of Bion (p. 63):--
+
+
+'Wildered, ungirt, unsandalled--the thorns pierce
+Her hastening feet, and drink her sacred blood.'
+
+
+11. 4,5. _The invisible Palms of her tender feet._ Shelley more than
+once uses 'palms' for 'soles' of the feet. See _Prometheus Unbound_, Act
+4:--
+
+
+'Our feet now, every palm,
+Are sandalled with calm';
+
+
+and _The Triumph of Life_:--
+
+
+        'As she moved under the mass
+Of the deep cavern, and, with palms so tender
+Their tread broke not the mirror of the billow,
+Glided along the river.'
+
+
+Perhaps Shelley got this usage from the Italian: in that language the
+web-feet of aquatic birds are termed 'palme.'
+
+11. 8, 9. _Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May, Paved with
+eternal flowers that undeserving way._ The tears of May are rain-drops;
+young, because the year is not far advanced. 'That undeserving way'
+seems a very poor expression. See (p. 64) the passage from Bion: 'A tear
+the Paphian sheds for each blood-drop of Adonis, and tears and blood on
+the earth are turned to flowers.'
+
++Stanza 25,+ 1. 3. _Death ... blushed to annihilation._ This very daring
+hyperbole will hardly bear--nor does it want--manipulation into prose.
+Briefly, the nature of Death is to be pallid: therefore Death, in
+blushing, abnegates his very nature, and almost ceases to be Death.
+
+11. 3, 4. _The breath Revisited those lips_, &c. As Death tended towards
+'annihilation,' so Adonais tended towards revival.
+
+1. 7. _'Silent lightning.'_ This means, I suppose, lightning
+unaccompanied by thunder--summer lightning.
+
++Stanza 26,+ 1. 1. _'Stay yet awhile.'_ See Bion (p. 64): 'Stay, Adonis!
+stay, dearest one!'
+
+1. 2, _'Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live.'_ See as above:--
+
+'That I may kiss thee now for the last time--
+But for as long as one short kiss may live!'
+
+
+1. 3. _'My heartless breast.'_ Urania's breast will henceforth be
+heartless, in the sense that, having bestowed her whole heart upon
+Adonais, she will have none to bestow upon any one else: so I understand
+the epithet.
+
+1. 4. _'That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive,'_ &c. See
+Bion (p. 64): 'This kiss will I treasure,' &c.
+
+11. 7-9. _'I would give All that I am, to be as thou now art:--But I am
+chained to Time, and cannot thence depart.'_ Founded on Bion (p. 64):
+'While wretched I yet live, being a goddess, and may not follow thee.'
+The alteration of phrase is somewhat remarkable. In Bion's Elegy the
+Cyprian Aphrodite is 'a goddess,' and therefore immortal. In Shelley's
+Elegy the Uranian Aphrodite does not speak of herself under any
+designation of immortality or eternity, but as 'chained to _Time_,' and
+incapable of departing from Time. As long as Time lives and operates,
+Urania must do the same. The dead have escaped from the dominion of
+Time: this Urania, cannot do. There is a somewhat similar train of
+thought in _Prometheus Unbound_,--where Prometheus the Titan, after
+enduring the torture of the Furies (Act 1), says--
+
+
+                 'Peace is in the grave:
+The grave holds all things beautiful and good,
+I am a God, and cannot find it _there_.'
+
+
++Stanza 27,+ 11. 1-4. _'O gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, Why
+didst thou leave,'_ &c. This is founded on--and as usual spiritualized
+from--the passage in Bion (p. 64); 'For why, ah overbold! didst thou
+follow the chase, and, being so fair, why wert thou thus over-hardy to
+fight with beasts?'
+
+1. 4. _'Dare the unpastured dragon in his den.'_ This phrase must no
+doubt be interpreted, not only in relation to the figurative Adonais.
+but also to the actual Keats, Keats had dared the unpastured dragon in
+his den, in the sense that he made a bold adventure into the poetical
+field, under conditions certain to excite the ire of adherents of the
+old school, whether in literature or in politics.
+
+1. 6. _'Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear.'_ Urania
+arraigns Keats for having made his inroad upon the dragon, unguarded by
+wisdom or by scorn. His want of wisdom was shown (we may assume) by the
+grave blemishes and defects in his _Endymion_, the wilful faults and
+perverse excesses and extravagances which mark its composition, and
+wantonly invited attack. His want of scorn was (according to Shelley's
+view of the facts), clear enough: he had not been equal to despising a
+spiteful attack, but had fretted himself to death under it. In terming
+these two defensive weapons, wisdom and scorn, a mirrored shield and a
+spear, Shelley was, I apprehend, thinking of the Orlando Furioso of
+Ariosto. In that poem we read of a magic shield which casts a
+supernatural and intolerable splendour, whereby every gazer is cast into
+a trance; and of a spear whose lightest touch overthrows every opponent.
+A sea-monster--not a dragon, so far as I recollect--becomes one of the
+victims of the 'mirrored shield.'
+
+11. 7, 8. _'The full cycle when Thy spirit should have filled its
+crescent sphere.'_ The spirit of Keats is here assimilated to the moon,
+which grows from a crescent into a spherical form.
+
+1. 9. _'The monsters of life's waste.'_ The noxious creatures which
+infest the wilderness of human life.
+
++Stanza 28,+ 1. 1. _'The herded wolves,'_ &c. These same 'monsters' are
+now pictured under three aspects. They are herded wolves, which will
+venture to pursue a traveller, but will not face him if he turns upon
+them boldly; and obscene ravens, which make an uproar over dead bodies,
+or dead reputations; and vultures, which follow in the wake of a
+conqueror, and gorge upon that which is already overthrown. In the
+succeeding stanza, 29, two other epithetal similes are bestowed upon the
+monsters--they become 'reptiles' and 'ephemeral insects.' All these
+repulsive images are of course here applied to critics of wilfully
+obtuse or malignant mind, such as Shelley accounted the _Quarterly_
+reviewer of Keats to be.
+
+1. 5, &c. _'How they fled When, like Apollo,'_ &c. The allusion is to
+perfectly well-known incidents in the opening poetic career of Lord
+Byron. His lordship, in earliest youth, published a very insignificant
+volume of verse named _Hours of Idleness_. The _Edinburgh
+Review_--rightly in substance, but with some superfluous harshness of
+tone--pronounced this volume to be poor stuff. Byron retaliated by
+producing his satire entitled _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_. With
+this book he scored a success. His next publication was the generally
+and enthusiastically admired commencement of _Childe Harold_, 1812;
+after which date the critics justly acclaimed him as a poet--although in
+course of time they grew lavishly severe upon him from the point of view
+of morals and religion. I reproduce from the Pisan edition the
+punctuation--'When like Apollo, from his golden bow'; but I think the
+exact sense would be better brought out if we read--'When, like Apollo
+from his golden bow, The Pythian,' &c.
+
+11. 7, 8. _'The Pythian of the age one arrow sped, And smiled.'_
+Byron is here assimilated to Apollo Pythius--Apollo the
+Python-slayer.
+The statue named Apollo Belvedere is regarded as representing
+the god at the moment after he has discharged his arrow
+at the python (serpent), his countenance irradiated with a half-smile
+of divine scorn and triumph. The terms employed by Shelley
+seem to glance more particularly at that celebrated statue: this
+was the more appropriate as Byron had devoted to the same
+figure two famous stanzas in the 4th canto of _Childe Harold_--
+
+'Or view the Lord of the unerring bow,
+The God of life and poesy and light,' &c.
+
+
+1. 9. _'They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.'_ In the
+Pisan edition we read 'that spurn them as they go.' No doubt the change
+(introduced as in other instances named on pp. 105 and 113) must be
+Shelley's own. The picture presented to the mind is more consistent,
+according to the altered reading. The critics, as we are told in this
+stanza, had at first 'fled' from Byron's arrow; afterwards they 'fawned
+on his proud feet.' In order to do this, they must have paused in their
+flight, and returned; and, in the act of fawning on Byron's feet, they
+must have crouched down, or were 'lying low.' (Mr. Forman, in his
+edition of Shelley, pointed this out.) With the words 'as they go' the
+image was not self-consistent: for the critics could not be 'going,' or
+walking away, at the same time when they were fawning on the poet's
+feet. This last remark assumes that the words 'as they go' mean 'as the
+critics go ': but perhaps (and indeed I think this is more than
+probable) the real meaning was 'as the feet of Byron go'--as Byron
+proceeds disdainfully on his way. If this was Shelley's original
+meaning, he probably observed after a while that the words 'as _they_
+go' seem to follow on with '_they_ fawn,' and not with 'the proud feet';
+and, in order to remove the ambiguity, he substituted the expression
+'lying low.'
+
++Stanza 29,+ 11. 1-3. _'The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn; He
+sets, and each ephemeral insect then Is gathered into death.'_ The
+spawning of a reptile (say a lizard or toad), and the death of an insect
+(say a beetle or gnat), are two things totally unconnected. Shelley
+however seems to link them together, as if this spawning were the origin
+of the life, the brief life, of the insect. He appears therefore to use
+'reptile,' not in the defined sense which we commonly attach to the
+word, but in the general sense of 'a creeping creature,' such for
+instance as a grub or caterpillar, the first form of an insect, leading
+on to its final metamorphosis or development. Even so his natural
+history is curiously at fault: for no grub or caterpillar can
+spawn--which is the function of the fully-developed insect itself,
+whether 'ephemeral' or otherwise. Can Shelley have been ignorant of
+this?
+
+1. 4. _'And the immortal stars awake again.'_ The imagery of this stanza
+(apart from the 'reptiles' and 'ephemeral insects') deserves a little
+consideration. The sun (says Shelley) arises, and then sets: when it
+sets, the immortal stars awake again. Similarly, a godlike mind (say the
+mind of Keats) appears, and its light illumines the earth, and veils the
+heaven: when it disappears, 'the spirit's awful night' is left to 'its
+kindred lamps.' This seems as much as to say that the splendour of a new
+poetic genius appears to contemporaries to throw preceding poets into
+obscurity; but this is only a matter of the moment, for, when the new
+genius sinks in death, the others shine forth again as stars of the
+intellectual zenith, to which the new genius is kindred indeed, but not
+superior. With these words concludes the speech of Urania, which began
+in stanza 25.
+
++Stanza 30,+ 1. 1. _The Mountain Shepherds_. These are contemporary
+British poets, whom Shelley represents as mourning the death of Keats.
+Shepherds are such familiar figures in poetry--utilized for instance in
+Milton's _Lycidas_, as well as by many poets of antiquity--that the
+introduction of them into Shelley's Elegy is no matter for surprise. Why
+they should be '_mountain_ shepherds' is not so clear. Perhaps Shelley
+meant to indicate a certain analogy between the exalted level at which
+the shepherds dwelt and the exalted level at which the poets wrote. As
+the shepherds do not belong to the low-country, so neither do the poets
+belong to the flats of verse. Shelley may have written with a certain
+degree of reference to that couplet in _Lycidas_--
+
+
+'For we were nursed upon the self-same _hill_,
+Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill.'
+
+
+1. 2. _Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent._ The garlands or
+chaplets of the mountain shepherds have become sere because (it may be
+presumed) the wearers, in their grief for the mortal illness and death
+of Adonais, have for some little while left them unrenewed. Or possibly
+the garlands withered at the moment when Spring 'threw down her kindling
+buds' (stanza 16), I do not well understand the expression 'magic
+mantles.' There seems to be no reason why the mantles of the shepherds,
+considered as shepherds, should be magic. Even when we contemplate the
+shepherds as poets, we may fail to discern why any magical property
+should be assigned to their mantles. By the use of the epithet 'magic'
+Shelley must have intended to bridge over the gap between the nominal
+shepherds and the real poets, viewed as inspired singers: for this
+purpose he has adopted a bold verbal expedient, but not I think an
+efficient one. It may be noticed that the 'uncouth swain' who is
+represented in _Lycidas_ as singing the dirge (in other words, Milton
+himself) is spoken of as having a mantle--it is a 'mantle blue' (see the
+penultimate line of that poem).
+
+1. 3. _The Pilgrim of Eternity._ This is Lord Byron. As inventor of the
+personage Childe Harold, the hero and so-called 'Pilgrim' of the poem
+_Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_, and as being himself to a great extent
+identical with his hero, Byron was frequently termed 'the Pilgrim.'
+Shelley adopts this designation, which he magnifies into 'the Pilgrim of
+Eternity,' He admired Byron most enthusiastically as a poet, and was
+generally on easy--sometimes on cordial--terms with him as a man. He has
+left us a fine and discriminating portrait of Byron in the 'Count
+Maddalo' of his poem _Julian and Maddalo_, written in 1818. At times
+however Shelley felt and expressed great indignation against Byron,
+especially in reference to the ungenerous and cruel conduct of the
+latter towards Miss Clairmont. See some brief reference to this matter
+at p. 9.
+
+11. 3-5. _Whose fame Over his living head like heaven is bent, An early
+but enduring monument._ These phrases are not very definite. When fame
+is spoken of as being bent over Byron's head, we must conceive of fame
+as taking a form cognizable by the senses. I think Shelley means to
+assimilate it to the rainbow; saying substantially--Fame is like an arc
+bent over Byron's head, as the arc of the rainbow is bent over the
+expanse of heaven. The ensuing term 'monument' applies rather to fame in
+the abstract than to any image of fame as an arc.
+
+11. 6, 7. _Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow._ No
+doubt it would have been satisfactory to Shelley if he could have
+found that Byron entertained or expressed any serious concern
+at Keats's premature death, and at the hard measure which had
+been meted out to him by critics. Byron did in fact admire
+_Hyperion_; writing (in November 1821, not long after the publication
+of _Adonais_)--'His fragment of _Hyperion_ seems actually inspired
+by the Titans, and is as sublime as Aeschylus'; and other
+utterances of his show that--being with difficulty persuaded to
+suppose that Keats's health and life had succumbed to the attack
+in the _Quarterly_--he fittingly censured the want of feeling or
+want of reflection on the critic's part which had produced so
+deplorable a result. But on the whole Byron's feeling towards
+Keats was one of savage contempt during the young poet's life,
+and of bantering levity after his death. Here are some specimens.
+(From a letter to Mr. Murray, 12 October, 1820). 'There is such
+a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables that I am ashamed
+to look at them.... No more Keats, I entreat. Flay him alive:
+if some of you don't, I must skin him myself. There is no bearing
+the drivelling idiotism of the manikin.'
+
+          '"Who killed John Keats?"
+          "I," says the Quarterly,
+          So savage and Tartarly;
+          "'Twas one of my feats."'
+
+'John Keats, who was killed off by one critique
+  Just as he really promised something great
+If not intelligible, without Greek
+  Contrived to talk about the gods of late,
+Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
+  Poor fellow, his was an untoward fate!
+'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
+Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.'
+
+
+11. 7-9. _From her wilds Ierne sent The sweetest lyrist of her saddest
+wrong, And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue._ Ierne
+(Ireland) sent Thomas Moore, the lyrist of her wrongs--an allusion to
+the _Irish Melodies_, and some other poems. There is not, I believe, any
+evidence to show that Moore took the slightest interest in Keats, his
+doings or his fate: Shelley is responsible for Moore's love, grief, and
+music, in this connexion. A letter from Keats has been published showing
+that at one time he expected to meet Moore personally (see p. 45).
+Whether he did so or not I cannot say for certain, but I apprehend not:
+the published Diary of Moore, of about the same date, suggests the
+negative.
+
++Stanza 31,+ 1. 1. _'Midst others of less note._ Shelley clearly means
+'less note' than Byron and Moore--not less note than the 'one frail
+form.'
+
+1. 2. _Came one frail form,_ &c. This personage represents Shelley
+himself. Shelley here describes himself under a profusion of
+characteristics, briefly defined: it may be interesting to summarize
+them, apart from the other details with which they are interspersed. He
+is a frail form; a phantom among men; companionless; one who had gazed
+Actaeon-like on Nature's naked loveliness, and who now fled with feeble
+steps, hounded by his own thoughts; a pard-like spirit beautiful and
+swift; a love masked in desolation; a power begirt with weakness,
+scarcely capable of lifting the weight of the hour; a breaking billow,
+which may even now be broken; the last of the company, neglected and
+apart--a herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart; in Keats's
+fate, he wept his own; his brow was branded and ensanguined. Most of
+these attributes can be summed up under one heading--that of extreme
+sensitiveness and susceptibility, which meet with no response or
+sustainment, but rather with misjudgment, repulse, and outrage. Some
+readers may think that Shelley insists upon this aspect of his character
+to a degree rather excessive, and dangerously near the confines of
+feminine sensibility, rather than virile fortitude. Apart from this
+predominant type of character, Shelley describes his spirit as
+'beautiful and swift'--which surely it was: and he says that, having
+gazed upon Nature's naked loveliness, he had suffered the fate of a
+second Actseon, fleeing 'o'er the world's wilderness,' and pursued by
+his own thoughts like raging hounds. By this expression Shelley
+apparently means that he had over-boldly tried to fathom the depths of
+things and of mind, but, baffled and dismayed in the effort, suffered,
+as a man living among men, by the very tension and vividness of his
+thoughts, and their daring in expression. See what he says of himself,
+in prose, on p. 92.
+
+11. 4, 5. _He, as I guess, Had gazed,_ &c. The use of the verb 'guess'
+in the sense of 'to surmise, conjecture, infer,' is now mostly counted
+as an Americanism. This is not correct; for the verb has often been thus
+used by standard English authors. Such a practice was not however common
+in Shelley's time, and he may have been guided chiefly by the rhyming.
+
++Stanza 32,+ 1. 4. _The weight of the superincumbent hour._ This line is
+scarcely rhythmical: to bring it within the ordinary scheme of ryhthm,
+one would have to lay an exaggerated stress on two of its feet--'thé
+supérincumbent.' Neither this treatment of the line, nor the line itself
+apart from this treatment, can easily be justified.
+
++Stanza 33,+ 11. 1, 2. _His head was bound with pansies overblown,
+And faded violets._ The pansy is the flower of thought, or memory:
+we commonly call it heartsease, but Shelley no doubt uses it here
+with a different, or indeed contrary, meaning. The violet indicates
+modesty. A stanza from one of his lyrics may be appropriately
+cited--_Remembrance_, dated 1821:--
+
+'Lilies for a bridal bed,
+Roses for a matron's head,
+Violets for a maiden dead,
+Pansies let _my_ flowers be.
+  On the living grave I bear
+  Scatter them without a tear;
+  Let no friend, however dear,
+Waste a hope, a fear, for me.'
+
+
+1. 3. _A light spear topped with a cypress cone._ The funereal cypress
+explains itself.
+
+1. 4. _Dark ivy tresses._ The ivy indicates constancy in friendship.
+
++Stanza 34,+ 1. 1. _His partial moan._ The epithet 'partial' is
+accounted for by what immediately follows--viz. that Shelley 'in
+another's fate now wept his own.' He, like Keats, was the object of
+critical virulence, and he was wont (but on very different grounds) to
+anticipate an early death. See (on p. 34) the expression in a letter
+from Shelley--'a writer who, however he may differ,' &c.
+
+1. 4. _As in the accents of an unknown land He sang new sorrow._ It is
+not very clear why Shelley should represent that he, as one of the
+Mountain Shepherds, used a language different (as one might infer) from
+that of his companions. All those whom he particularizes were his
+compatriots. Perhaps however Shelley merely means that the language
+(English) was that of a land unknown to the Greek deity Aphrodite
+Urania. The phrase 'new sorrow' occurs in the Elegy by Moschus (p. 65).
+By the use of this phrase Shelley seems to mean not merely that the
+death of Keats was a recent and sorrowful event, but more especially
+that it constituted a new sorrow--one more sorrow--to Shelley himself.
+
+11. 3, 5. I reproduce the punctuation of the Pisan edition, with a colon
+after 'his own,' and a semicolon after 'sorrow.' It appears to me
+however that the sense would rather require either a full stop after
+'his own,' and a comma after 'sorrow,' or else a comma after 'his own,'
+and a full stop or colon after 'sorrow.' Yet it is possible that the
+phrase, 'As in the accents,' &c., forms a separate clause by itself,
+meaning, 'As _if_ in the accents of an unknown land, he sang new
+sorrow.'
+
+11. 8, 9. _Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, Which was like
+Cain's or Christ's._ Shelley represents his own brow as being branded
+like Cain's--stamped with the mark of reprobation; and ensanguined like
+Christ's--bleeding from a crown of thorns. This indicates the extreme
+repugnance with which he was generally regarded, and in especial perhaps
+the decree of the Court of Chancery which deprived him of his children
+by his first marriage--and generally the troubles and sufferings which
+he had undergone. The close coupling-together, in this line, of the
+names of Cain and Christ, was not likely to conciliate antagonists; and
+indeed one may safely surmise that it was done by Shelley more for the
+rather wanton purpose of exasperating them than with any other
+object.--In this stanza Urania appears for the last time.
+
++Stanza 35,+ 1, 1. _What softer voice is hushed over the dead?_ The
+personage here referred to is Leigh Hunt. See p. 45.
+
+1. 6. _Gentlest of the wise._ It is apparent that Shelley entertained a
+very sincere affection and regard for Leigh Hunt. He dedicated to Hunt
+the tragedy of _The Cenci_, using the following expressions among
+others: 'Had I known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all
+that it becomes a man to possess, I had solicited for this work the
+ornament of his name. One more gentle, honourable, innocent, and brave;
+one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet
+himself more free from evil; one who knows better how to receive and how
+to confer a benefit, though he must ever confer far more than he can
+receive; one of simpler and (in the highest sense of the word) of purer
+life and manners, I never knew: and I had already been fortunate in
+friendships when your name was added to the list.'
+
+1. 7. _Taught, soothed, loved, honoured, the departed one._ It has
+sometimes been maintained that Hunt, whatever may have been the personal
+friendship which he felt for Keats, did not, during the latter's
+lifetime, champion his literary cause with so much zeal as might have
+been expected from his professions. This is a point open to a good deal
+of discussion from both sides. Mr. Buxton Forman, who, as Editor of
+Keats, had occasion to investigate the matter attentively, pronounces
+decidedly in favour of Hunt.
+
++Stanza 36,+ 1. 1. _Our Adonais has drunk poison._ Founded on those
+lines of Moschus which appear as a motto to Shelley's Elegy. See also p.
+49.
+
+1. 2. _What deaf and viperous murderer._ Deaf, because insensible to the
+beauty of Keats's verse; and viperous, because poisonous and malignant.
+The juxtaposition of the two epithets may probably be also partly
+dependent on that passage in the Psalms (lviii. 4, 5) which has become
+proverbial: 'They are as venomous as the poison of a serpent: even like
+the deaf adder that stoppeth her ears; which refuseth to hear the voice
+of the charmer, charm he never so wisely.'
+
+1. 4. _The nameless worm._ A worm, as being one of the lowest forms of
+life, is constantly used as a term implying contempt; but it may be
+assumed that Shelley here uses 'worm' in its original sense, that of any
+crawling creature, more especially of the snake kind. There would thus
+be no departure from the previous epithet 'viperous.' See the remarks as
+to 'reptiles,' St. 29.
+
+11. 5, 6. _The magic tone Whose prelude,_ &c. Shelley, it will be
+perceived, here figures Keats as a minstrel striking the lyre, and
+preparing to sing. He strikes the lyre in a 'magic tone'; the very
+'prelude' of this was enough to command silent expectation. This prelude
+is the poem of _Endymion_, to which the _Quarterly_ reviewer alone
+(according to Shelley) was insensitive, owing to feelings of 'envy,
+hate, and wrong.' The prelude was only an induction to the
+'song,'--which was eventually poured forth in the _Lamia_ volume, and
+especially (as our poet opined) in _Hyperion_. But now Keats's hand is
+cold in death, and his lyre unstrung. As I have already observed--see p.
+35, &c.--Shelley was mistaken in supposing that the _Quarterly Review_
+had held a monopoly of 'envy, hate, and wrong'--or, as one might now
+term them, detraction, spite, and unfairness--in reference to Keats.
+
++Stanza 37,+ 1. 4. _But be thyself, and know thyself to be!_ The precise
+import of this line is not, I think, entirely plain at first sight. I
+conceive that we should take the line as immediately consequent upon the
+preceding words--'Live thou, live!' Premising this, one might amplify
+the idea as follows; 'While Keats is dead, be it thy doom, thou his deaf
+and viperous murderer, to live! But thou shalt live in thine own
+degraded identity, and shalt thyself be conscious how degraded thou
+art.' Another suggestion might be that the words 'But be thyself are
+equivalent to 'Be but thyself.'
+
+11. 5, 6. _And ever at thy season be thou free To spill the venom when
+thy fangs o'erflow._ This keeps up the image of the 'viperous'
+murderer--the viper. 'At thy season' can be understood as a reference to
+the periodical issues of the _Quarterly Review_. The word 'o'erflow' is,
+in the Pisan edition, printed as two words--'o'er flow.'
+
+1. 7. _Remorse and self-contempt._ Shelley frequently dwells upon
+self-contempt as one of the least tolerable of human distresses.
+Thus in the _Revolt of Islam_ (Canto 8, st. 20):
+
+'Yes, it is Hate--that shapeless fiendly thing
+Of many names, all evil, some divine--
+Whom self-contempt arms with a mortal sting,' &c.
+
+And in _Prometheus Unbound_ (Act i)--
+
+                 'Regard this earth
+Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou
+Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise?
+And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts,
+With fear and self-contempt and barren hope.'
+
+Again (Act ii, sc. 4)--
+
+'And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood.'
+
+
++Stanza 38,+ 1. 1. _Nor let us weep,_ &c. So far as the broad current of
+sentiment is concerned, this is the turning-point of Shelley's Elegy.
+Hitherto the tone has been continuously, and through a variety of
+phases, one of mourning for the fact that Keats, the great poetical
+genius, is untimely dead. But now the writer pauses, checks himself, and
+recognises that mourning is not the only possible feeling, nor indeed
+the most appropriate one. As his thought expands and his rapture rises,
+he soon acknowledges that, so far from grieving for Keats who _is_ dead,
+it were far more relevant to grieve for himself who is _not_ dead. This
+paean of recantation and aspiration occupies the remainder of the poem.
+
+1. 2. _These carrion kites._ A term of disparagement corresponding
+nearly enough to the 'ravens' and 'vultures' of st. 28.
+
+1. 3. _He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead._ With such of the dead
+as have done something which survives themselves. It will be observed
+that the phrase 'he wakes _or_ sleeps' leaves the question of personal
+or individual immortality quite open. As to this point see the remarks
+on p. 54, &c.
+
+1. 4. Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now. This is again
+addressed to the 'deaf and viperous murderer,' regarded for the
+moment as a 'carrion kite.' As kites are eminently high flyers,
+the phrase here used becomes the more emphatic. This line of
+Shelley's is obviously adapted from a passage in Milton's _Paradise
+Lost_, where Satan addresses the angels in Eden (Book 4)--
+
+             'Ye knew me once, no mate
+For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar.'
+
+
+1. 5. _The pure spirit shall flow_, &c. The spirit which once was the
+vital or mental essence--the soul--of Adonais came from the Eternal
+Soul, and, now that he is dead, is re-absorbed into the Eternal Soul: as
+such, it is imperishable.
+
+1. 9. _Whilst thy cold embers choke_, &c. The spirit of Adonais came as
+a flame from the 'burning fountain' of the Eternal, and has now reverted
+thither, he being one of the 'enduring dead.' But the 'deaf and viperous
+murderer' must not hope for a like destiny. His spirit, after death,
+will be merely like 'cold embers,' cumbering the 'hearth of shame.' As a
+rhetorical antithesis, this serves its purpose well: no doubt Shelley
+would not have pretended that it is a strictly reasoned antithesis as
+well, or furnishes a full account of the _post-mortem_ fate of the
+_Quarterly_ reviewer.
+
++Stanza 39,+ 11. 1, 2. _Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not
+sleep! He hath awakened from the dream of life._ Shelley now
+proceeds boldly to declare that the state which we call death is to
+be preferred to that which we call life. Keats is neither dead nor
+sleeping. He used to be asleep, perturbed and tantalized by the
+dream which is termed life. Having at last awakened from the
+dream, he is no longer asleep: and, if life is no more than a dream,
+neither does the cessation of life deserve to be named death.
+The transition from one emotion to another in this passage, and
+also in the preceding stanza, 'Nor let us weep,' &c., resembles
+the transition towards the close of _Lycidas_--
+
+'Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more,
+For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,' &c.
+
+The general view has considerable affinity to that which is
+expounded in a portion of Plato's dialogue _Phaedo_, and which has
+been thus summarised. 'Death is merely the separation of soul
+and body. And this is the very consummation at which Philosophy
+aims: the body hinders thought,--the mind attains to truth
+by retiring into herself. Through no bodily sense does she perceive
+justice, beauty, goodness, and other ideas. The philosopher
+has a lifelong quarrel with bodily desires, and he should welcome
+the release of his soul.'
+
+1. 3. _'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions_, &c. We, the so-called
+living, are in fact merely beset by a series of stormy visions which
+constitute life; all our efforts are expended upon mere phantoms, and
+are therefore profitless; our mental conflict is an act of trance,
+exercised upon mere nothings. The very energetic expression, 'strike
+with our spirit's knife invulnerable nothings,' is worthy of remark. It
+will be remembered that, according to Shelley's belief, 'nothing exists
+but as it is perceived': see p. 56. The view of life expressed with
+passionate force in this passage of _Adonais_ is the same which forms
+the calm and placid conclusion of _The Sensitive Plant_, a poem written
+in 1820;--
+
+
+               'But, in this life
+Of error, ignorance, and strife,
+Where nothing is but all things seem.
+And we the shadows of the dream,
+
+It is a modest creed, and yet
+Pleasant if one considers it,
+To own that death itself must be,
+Like all the rest, a mockery.
+
+That garden sweet, that Lady fair,
+And all sweet shapes and odours there,
+In truth have never passed away:
+'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.
+
+For love, and beauty, and delight,
+There is no death nor change; their might
+Exceeds our organs, which endure
+No light, being themselves obscure.'
+
+
+11. 6, 7. _We decay Like corpses in a charnel_, &c. Human life consists
+of a process of decay. While living, we are consumed by fear and grief;
+our disappointed hopes swarm in our living persons like worms in our
+corpses.
+
++Stanza 40,+ 1. 1. _He has outsoared the shadow of our night._ As human
+life was in the last stanza represented as a dream, so the state of
+existence in which it is enacted is here figured as night.
+
+1. 5. _From the contagion of the world's slow stain._ It may be said
+that 'the world's slow stain'--the lowering influence of the aims and
+associations of all ordinary human life--is the main subject-matter of
+Shelley's latest important poem, _The Triumph of Life._
+
+1. 9. _With sparkless ashes._ See the cognate expression, 'thy cold
+embers,' in st. 38.
+
++Stanza 41,+ 1. 1. _He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he._ In
+the preceding three stanzas Adonais is contemplated as being alive,
+owing to the very fact that his death has awakened him 'from the dream
+of life'--mundane life. Death has bestowed upon him a vitality superior
+to that of mundane life. Death therefore has performed an act contrary
+to his own essence as death, and has practically killed, not Adonais,
+but himself.
+
+1. 2. _Thou young Dawn._ We here recur to the image in st. 14, 'Morning
+sought her eastern watch-tower,' &c.
+
+1. 5. _Ye caverns and ye forests_, &c. The poet now adjures the caverns,
+forests, flowers, fountains, and air, to 'cease to moan.' Of the flowers
+we had heard in st. 16: but the other features of Nature which are now
+addressed had not previously been individually mentioned--except, to
+some extent, by implication, in st. 15, which refers more directly to
+'Echo.' The reference to the air had also been, in a certain degree,
+prepared for in stanza 23. The stars are said to smile on the Earth's
+despair. This does not, I apprehend, indicate any despair of the Earth
+consequent on the death of Adonais, but a general condition of woe. A
+reference of a different kind to stars--a figurative reference--appears
+in st. 29.
+
++Stanza 42,+ 1. 1. _He is made one with Nature._ This stanza ascribes to
+Keats the same phase of immortality which belongs to Nature. Having
+'awakened from the dream of [mundane] life,' his spirit forms an
+integral portion of the universe. Those acts of intellect which he
+performed in the flesh remain with us, as thunder and the song of the
+nightingale remain with us.
+
+11. 6, 7. _Where'er that power may move Which has withdrawn his being to
+its own._ This corresponds to the expression in st. 38--'The pure spirit
+shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the
+Eternal.'
+
+1. 8. _Who wields the world with never wearied love_, &c. These two
+lines are about the nearest approach to definite Theism to be found in
+any writing of Shelley. The conception, which may amount to Theism, is
+equally consistent with Pantheism. Even in his most anti-theistic poem,
+_Queen Mab_, Shelley said in a note--'The hypothesis of a pervading
+Spirit, co-eternal with the universe, remains unshaken.'
+
++Stanza 43,+ 11. 1-3. _He is a portion of the loveliness Which ones he
+made more lovely. He doth bear his part_, &c. The conception embodied in
+this passage may become more clear to the reader if its terms are
+pondered in connexion with the passage of Shelley's prose extracted on
+p. 56--'The existence of distinct individual minds,' &c. Keats, while a
+living man, had made the loveliness of the universe more lovely by
+expressing in poetry his acute and subtle sense of its beauties--by
+lavishing on it (as we say) 'the colours of his imagination,' He was
+then an 'individual mind'--according to the current, but (as Shelley
+held) inexact terminology. He has now, by death, wholly passed out of
+the class of individual minds; and he forms a portion of the Universal
+Mind (the 'One Spirit') which is the animation of the universe.
+
+11. 3, 4. _While the One Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull
+dense world_, &c. The function ascribed in these lines to the One Spirit
+is a formative or animating function: the Spirit constitutes the life of
+'trees and beasts and men.' This view is strictly within the limits of
+Pantheism.
+
++Stanza 44,+ 1. 1. _The splendours of the firmament of time_, &c. As
+there are stars in the firmament of heaven, so are there
+splendours--luminous intellects--in the firmament of time. The stars,
+though at times eclipsed, are not extinguished; nor yet the mental
+luminaries. This asseveration may be considered in connexion with the
+passage in st. 5: 'Others more sublime, Struck by the envious wrath of
+man or God, Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime.'
+
+11. 5, 6. _When lofty thought Lifts a young heart_, &c. The sense of
+this passage may be paraphrased thus:--When lofty thought lifts a young
+heart above its mundane environments, and when its earthly doom has to
+be determined by the conflicting influences of love, which would elevate
+it, and the meaner cares and interests of life, which would drag it
+downwards, then the illustrious dead live again in that heart--for its
+higher emotions are nurtured by their noble thoughts and
+aspirations,--and they move, like exhalations of light along dark and
+stormy air. This illustrates the previous proposition, that the
+splendours of the firmament of time are not extinguished; and, in the
+most immediate application of the proposition, Keats is not
+extinguished--he will continue an ennobling influence upon minds
+struggling towards the light.
+
++Stanza 45,+ 1. 2. _The inheritors of unfulfilled renown Rose from their
+thrones._ There is a grand abruptness in this phrase, which makes it--as
+a point of poetical or literary structure--one of the finest things in
+the Elegy. We are to understand (but Shelley is too great a master to
+formulate it in words) that Keats, as an 'inheritor of unfulfilled
+renown'--i.e. a great intellect cut off by death before its maturest
+fruits could be produced--has now arrived among his compeers: they rise
+from their thrones to welcome him. In this connexion Shelley chooses to
+regard Keats as still a living spiritual personality--not simply as
+'made one with Nature.' He is one of those 'splendours of the firmament
+of time' who 'may be eclipsed, but are extinguished not.'
+
+11. 3-5. _Chatterton Rose pale, his solemn agony had not Yet faded from
+him._ For precocity and exceptional turn of genius Chatterton was
+certainly one of the most extraordinary of 'the inheritors of
+unfulfilled renown'; indeed, the most extraordinary: he committed
+suicide by poison in 1770, before completing the eighteenth year of his
+age. His supposititious modern-antique _Poems of Rowley_ may, as actual
+achievements, have been sometimes overpraised: but at the lowest
+estimate they have beauties and excellences of the most startling kind.
+He wrote besides a quantity of verse and prose, of a totally different
+order. Keats admired Chatterton profoundly, and dedicated _Endymion_ to
+his memory. I cannot find that Shelley, except in _Adonais_, has left
+any remarks upon Chatterton: but he is said by Captain Medwin to have
+been, in early youth, very much impressed by his writings.
+
+1. 5. _Sidney, as he fought_, &c. Sir Philip Sidney, author of _The
+Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia_, the _Apology for Poetry_, and the
+sonnets named _Astrophel and Stella_, died in his thirty-second year, of
+a wound received in the battle of Zutphen, 1586. Shelley intimates that
+Sidney maintained the character of being 'sublimely mild' in fighting,
+falling (dying), and loving, as well as generally in living. The special
+references appear to be these. (1) Sidney, observing that the Lord
+Marshal, the Earl of Leicester, had entered the field of Zutphen without
+greaves, threw off his own, and thus exposed himself to the cannon-shot
+which slew him. (2) Being mortally wounded, and receiving a cup of
+water, he handed it (according to a tradition which is not
+unquestionable) to a dying soldier. (3) His series of sonnets record his
+love for Penelope Devereux, sister to the Earl of Essex, who married
+Lord Rich. She had at one time been promised to Sidney. He wrote the
+sonnets towards 1581: in 1583 he married another lady, daughter of Sir
+Francis Walsingham. It has been said that Shelley was wont to make some
+self-parade in connexion with Sir Philip Sidney, giving it to be
+understood that he was himself a descendant of the hero--which was not
+true, although the Sidney blood came into a different line of the
+family. Of this story I have not found any tangible confirmation.
+
+1. 8. _Lucan, by his death approved._ Lucan, the author of the
+_Pharsalia_, was condemned under Nero as being an accomplice in the
+conspiracy of Piso: he caused his veins to be opened, and died
+magnanimously, aged about twenty-six, A.D. 65. Shelley, in one instance,
+went so far as to pronounce Lucan superior to Vergil.
+
++Stanza 46,+ 11. 1, 2. _And many more, whose names on earth are dark,
+But whose transmitted effluence cannot die_, &c. This glorious company
+would include no doubt, not only the recorders of great thoughts, or
+performers of great deeds, which are still borne in memory although the
+names of the authors are forgotten, but also many whose work is as
+totally unknown as their names, but who exerted nevertheless a bright
+and elevating ascendant over other minds, and who thus conduced to the
+greatness of human-kind.
+
+1. 6. _It was for thee_, &c. The synod of the inheritors of unfulfilled
+renown here invite Keats to assume possession of a sphere, or
+constellation, which had hitherto been 'kingless,' or unappropriated. It
+had 'swung blind in unascended majesty': had not been assigned to any
+radiant spirit, whose brightness would impart brilliancy to the sphere
+itself.
+
+1. 8. _Silent alone amid an heaven of song._ This phrase points
+primarily to 'the music of the spheres': the sphere now assigned to
+Keats had hitherto failed to take part in the music of its fellows, but
+henceforward will chime in. Probably there is also a subsidiary, but in
+its context not less prominent meaning--namely, that, while the several
+poets (such as Chatterton, Sidney, and Lucan) had each a vocal sphere of
+his own, apposite to his particular poetic quality, the sphere which
+Keats is now to control had hitherto remained unoccupied because no poet
+of that special type of genius which it demanded had as yet appeared.
+Its affinity was for Keats, and for no one else. This is an implied
+attestation of Keats's poetic originality.
+
+1. 9. _Assume thy wingèd throne, thou Vesper of our throng!_ The wingèd
+throne is, I think, a synonym of the 'sphere' itself--not a throne
+within the sphere: 'wingèd,' because the sphere revolves in space. Yet
+the statement in stanza 45 that 'the inheritors of unfulfilled renown
+rose from their thrones' (which cannot be taken to represent distinct
+spheres or constellations) suggests the opposite interpretation. Keats
+is termed 'thou Vesper of our throng' because he is the latest member of
+this glorified band--or, reckoning the lapse of ages as if they were but
+a day, its 'evening star.' The exceptional brilliancy of the Vesper star
+is not, I think, implied--though it may be remotely suggested.
+
++Stanza 47,+ 1. 3. _Clasp with thy panting soul_, &c. The significance
+of this stanza--perhaps a rather obscure one--requires to be estimated
+as a whole. Shelley summons any person who persists in mourning for
+Adonais to realise to his own mind what are the true terms of comparison
+between Adonais and himself. After this, he says in this stanza no more
+about Adonais, but only about the mourner. He calls upon the mourner to
+consider (1) the magnitude of the planet earth; then, using the earth as
+his centre, to consider (2) the whole universe of worlds, and the
+illimitable void of space beyond all worlds; next he is to consider (3)
+what he himself is--he is confined within the day and night of our
+planet, and, even within those restricted limits, he is but an
+infinitesimal point. After he shall have realised this to himself, and
+after the tension of his soul in ranging through the universe and
+through space shall have kindled hope after hope, wonderment and
+aspiration after aspiration and wonderment, then indeed will he need to
+keep his heart light, lest it make him sink at the contemplation of his
+own nullity.
+
+1. 9. _And lured thee to the brink._ This phrase is not definitely
+accounted for in the preceding exposition. I think Shelley means that
+the successive hopes kindled in the mourner by the ideas of a boundless
+universe of space and of spirit will have lured him to the very brink of
+mundane life--to the borderland between life and death: he will almost
+have been tempted to have done with life, and to explore the
+possibilities of death.
+
++Stanza 48,+ 1. 1. _Or go to Rome._ This is still addressed to the
+mourner, the 'fond wretch' of the preceding stanza. He is here invited
+to adopt a different test for 'knowing himself and Adonais aright';
+namely, he is to visit Rome, and muse over the grave of the youthful
+poet.
+
+11. 1, 2. _Which is the sepulchre, Oh not of him, but of our joy._ Keats
+is not entombed in Rome: his poor mortal remains are there entombed,
+and, along with them, the joy which we felt in him as a living and
+breathing presence.
+
+11. 2, 3. _'Tis nought That ages, empires, and religions, &c._ Keats,
+and others such as he, derive no adventitious honour from being buried
+in Rome, amid the wreck of ages, empires, and religions: rather they
+confer honour. He is among his peers, the kings of thought, who, so far
+from being dragged down in the ruin of institutions, contended against
+that ruin, and are alone immortal while all the rest of the past has
+come to nought. This consideration may be said to qualify, but not to
+reverse, that which is presented in stanza 7, that Keats 'bought, with
+price of purest breath, a grave among the eternal'; those eternal ones,
+buried in Rome, include many of the 'kings of thought.'
+
++Stanza 46,+ 11. 3, 4. _And where its wrecks like shattered mountains
+rise, And flowering weeds_, &c. These expressions point more especially,
+but not exclusively, to the Coliseum and the Baths of Caracalla. In
+Shelley's time (and something alike was the case in 1862, the year when
+the present writer saw them first) both these vast monuments were in a
+state wholly different from that which they now, under the hands of
+learned archaeologists and skilled restorers, present to the eye.
+Shelley began, probably in 1819, a romantic or ideal tale named _The
+Coliseum_; and, ensconced amid the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, he
+composed, in the same year, a large part of _Promethens Unbound_. A few
+extracts from his letters may here be given appropriately. (To T.L.
+Peacock, 22 December, 18i8). 'The Coliseum is unlike any work of human
+hands I ever saw before. It is of enormous height and circuit, and the
+arches, built of massy stones, are piled, on one another, and jut into
+the blue air, shattered into the forms of overhanging rocks. It has been
+changed by time into the image of an amphitheatre of rocky hills
+overgrown by the wild olive, the myrtle, and the figtree, and threaded
+by little paths which wind among its ruined stairs and immeasurable
+galleries: the copsewood overshadows you as you wander through its
+labyrinths.'--(To the same, 23 March, 1819). 'The next most considerable
+relic of antiquity, considered as a ruin, is the Thermae of Caracalla.
+These consist of six enormous chambers, above 200 feet in height, and
+each enclosing a vast space like that of a field. There are in addition
+a number of towers and labyrinthine recesses, hidden and woven over by
+the wild growth of weeds and ivy. Never was any desolation so sublime
+and lovely.... At every step the aërial pinnacles of shattered stone
+group into new combinations of effect, and tower above the lofty yet
+level walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one
+travelling rapidly along the plain.... Around rise other crags and other
+peaks--all arrayed, and the deformity of their vast desolation softened
+down, by the undecaying investiture of Nature.'
+
+1. 7. _A slope of green access._ The old Protestant Cemetery. Shelley
+described it thus in his letter to Mr. Peacock of 22 December, 1818.
+'The English burying-place is a green slope near the walls, under the
+pyramidal tomb of Cestius, and is, I think, the most beautiful and
+solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright
+grass, fresh, when we visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the
+whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have
+overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the
+sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people
+who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep
+they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind, and so it peoples with its
+wishes vacancy and oblivion.'--See also pp. 69, 70.
+
++Stanza 50,+ 1. 3. _One keen pyramid._ The tomb (see last note) of Caius
+Cestius, a Tribune of the People.
+
+11. 4, 5. _The dust of him who planned This refuge for his memory._
+Shelley probably means that this sepulchral pyramid alone preserves to
+remembrance the name of Cestius: which is true enough, as next to
+nothing is otherwise known about him.
+
+1. 8. _Have pitched in heaven's smile their camp of death._ The practice
+which Shelley follows in this line of making 'heaven' a dissyllable is
+very frequent with him. So also with 'even, higher,' and other such
+words.
+
++Stanza 51,+ 11. 3, 4. _If the seal is set Here on one fountain of a
+mourning mind._ Shelley certainly alludes to himself in this line. His
+beloved son William, who died in June 1819, in the fourth year of his
+age, was buried in this cemetery: the precise spot is not now known.
+
+11. 5-7. _Too surely shalt thou find Thine own well full, if thou
+returnest home, Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind_, &c.
+The apposition between the word 'well' and the preceding word 'fountain'
+will be observed. The person whom Shelley addresses would, on returning
+home from the cemetery, find more than, ample cause, of one sort or
+another, for distress and discomposure. Hence follows the conclusion
+that he would do well to 'seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb': he
+should prefer the condition of death to that of life. And so we reach in
+stanza 51 the same result which, in stanza 47, was deduced from a
+different range of considerations.
+
++Stanza 52,+ 1. 1. _The One remains, the many change and pass._ See the
+notes on stanzas 42 and 43. 'The One' is the same as 'the One Spirit' in
+stanza 43--the Universal Mind. The Universal Mind has already been
+spoken of (stanza 38) as 'the Eternal.' On the other hand, 'the many'
+are the individuated minds which we call 'human beings': they 'change
+and pass'--the body perishing, the mind which informed it being (in
+whatever sense) reabsorbed into 'the Eternal.'
+
+1. 2. _Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly._ This is in
+strictness a physical descriptive image: in application, it means the
+same as the preceding line.
+
+11. 3-5. _Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white
+radiance of eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments._ Perhaps a
+more daring metaphorical symbol than this has never been employed by any
+poet, nor one that has a deeper or a more spacious meaning. Eternity is
+figured as white light--light in its quintessence. Life, mundane life,
+is as a dome of glass, which becomes many-coloured by its prismatic
+diffraction of the white light: its various prisms reflect eternity at
+different angles. Death ultimately tramples the glass dome into
+fragments; each individual life is shattered, and the whole integer of
+life, constituted of the many individual lives, is shattered. If
+everything else written by Shelley were to perish, and only this
+consummate image to remain--so vast in purport, so terse in form--he
+would still rank as a poet of lofty imagination. _Ex pede Herculem._
+
+11. 5, 6. _Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek._ This
+phrase is addressed by the poet to anybody, and more especially to
+himself. As in stanza 38--'The pure spirit shall flow Back to the
+burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal.'
+
+11. 7-9. _Rome's azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are
+weak The glory thy transfuse with fitting truth to speak._ I follow here
+the punctuation of the Pisan edition--with a comma after 'words,' as
+well as after 'sky, flowers,' &c. According to this punctuation, the
+words of Rome, as well as her sky and other beautiful endowments, are
+too weak to declare at full the glory which they impart; and the
+inference from this rather abruptly introduced recurrence to Rome is (I
+suppose), that the spiritual glory faintly adumbrated by Rome can only
+be realised in that realm of eternity to which death gives access. Taken
+in this sense, the 'words' of Rome appear to mean 'the beautiful
+language spoken in Rome'--the Roman or Latin language, as modified into
+modern Italian. The pronunciation of Italian in Rome is counted
+peculiarly pure and rich: hence the Italian axiom, 'lingua toscana in
+bocca romana'--Tuscan tongue in Roman mouth. At first sight, it would
+seem far more natural to punctuate thus: Rome's azure sky, Flowers,
+ruins, statues, music,--words are weak The glory, &c. The sense would
+then be--Words are too weak to declare at full the glory inherent in the
+sky, flowers, &c. of Rome. Yet, although this seems a more
+straightforward arrangement for the words of the sentence, as such, it
+is not clear that such a comment on the beauties of Rome would have any
+great relevancy in its immediate context.
+
++Stanza 53,+ 1. 2. _Thy hopes are gone before_, &c. This stanza contains
+some very pointed references to the state of Shelley's feelings at the
+time when he was writing _Adonais_; pointed, but not so clearly defined
+as to make his actual meaning transparent. We are told that his hopes
+are gone before (i.e. have vanished before the close of his life has
+come), and have departed from all things here. This may partly refer to
+the deaths of William Shelley and of Keats; but I think the purport of
+the phrase extends further, and implies that Shelley's hopes
+generally--those animating conceptions which had inspired him in early
+youth, and had buoyed him up through many adversities--are now waning in
+disappointment. This is confirmed by the ensuing statement--that 'a
+light is past from the revolving year [a phrase repeated from stanza
+18], and man and woman.' Next we are told that 'what still is dear
+Attracts to crush, repels to make thee [me] wither.' The _persons_ who
+were more particularly dear to Shelley at this time must have been (not
+to mention the two children Percy Florence Shelley and Allegra
+Clairmont) his wife, Miss Clairmont, Emilia Viviani, and Lieutenant and
+Mrs. Williams: Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Godwin, can hardly be in question.
+No doubt Shelley's acute feelings and mobile sympathies involved him in
+some considerable agitations, from time to time, with all the four
+ladies here named: but the strong expressions which he uses as to
+attracting and repelling, crushing and withering, seem hardly likely to
+have been employed by him in this personal sense, in a published book.
+Perhaps therefore we shall be safest in supposing that he alludes, not
+to _persons_ who are dear, but to circumstances and conditions of a more
+general kind--such as are involved in his self-portraiture, stanzas
+31-34.
+
+1. 8. _'Tis Adonais calls! oh hasten thither!_ 'Thither' must mean 'to
+Adonais': a laxity of expression.
+
++Stanza 64,+ 1. 1. _That light whose smile kindles the universe_, &c.
+This is again the 'One Spirit' of stanza 43. And see, in stanza 42, the
+cognate expression, 'kindles it above.'
+
+11. 3, 4. _That benediction which the eclipsing curse Of birth can
+quench not._ The curse of birth is, I think, simply the calamitous
+condition of mundane life--so often referred to in this Elegy as a
+condition of abjection and unhappiness. The curse of birth can eclipse
+the benediction of Universal Mind, but cannot quench it: in other words,
+the human mind, in its passage from the birth to the death of the body,
+is still an integral portion of the Universal Mind.
+
+1. 7. _Each are mirrors._ This is of course a grammatical
+irregularity--the verb should be 'is.' It is not the only instance of
+the same kind in Shelley's poetry.
+
+1. 9. _Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality._ This does not imply
+that Shelley is shortly about to die. 'Cold mortality' is that condition
+in which the human mind, a portion of the Universal Mind, is united to a
+mortal body: and the general sense is that the Universal Mind at this
+moment beams with such effulgence upon Shelley that his mind responds to
+it as if the mortal body no longer interposed any impediment.
+
++Stanza 55,+ 1. 1. _The breath whose might I have invoked in song._ The
+breath or afflatus of the Universal Mind. It has been 'invoked in song'
+throughout the whole later section of this Elegy, from stanza 38
+onwards.
+
+1. 2. _My spirits bark is driven_, &c. As was observed with reference to
+the preceding stanza, line 9, this phrase does not forecast the author's
+death: it only re-emphasises the abnormal illumination of his mind by
+the Universal Mind--as if his spirit (like that of Keats) 'had flowed
+back to the burning fountain whence it came, a portion of the Eternal'
+(stanza 38). Nevertheless, it is very remarkable that this image of 'the
+spirit's _bark_,' beaconed by 'the soul of Adonais,' should have been
+written so soon before Shelley's death by drowning, which occurred on 8
+July, 1822,--but little more than a year after he had completed this
+Elegy. Besides this passage, there are in Shelley's writings, both verse
+and prose, several other passages noticeable on the same
+account--relating to drowning, and sometimes with a strong personal
+application; and in various instances he was in imminent danger of this
+mode of death before the end came.
+
+11. 3, 4. _Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails
+were never to the tempest given._ In saying that his spirit's bark is
+driven far from the shore, Shelley apparently means that his mind, in
+speculation and aspiration, ranges far beyond those mundane and material
+interests with which the mass of men are ordinarily concerned. 'The
+trembling throng' is, I think, a throng of men: though it might be a
+throng of barks, contrasted with 'my spirit's bark.' Their sails 'were
+never to the tempest given,' in the sense that they never set forth on a
+bold ideal or spiritual adventure, abandoning themselves to the stress
+and sway of a spiritual storm.
+
+1. 5. _The massy earth_, &c. As the poet launches forth on his voyage
+upon the ocean of mind, the earth behind him seems to gape, and the sky
+above him to open: his course however is still held on in darkness--the
+arcanum is hardly or not at all revealed.
+
+1. 7. _Whilst burning through the inmost veil_, &c. A star pilots his
+course: it is the soul of Adonais, which, being still 'a portion of the
+Eternal' (st. 38), is in 'the abode where the Eternal are,' and
+testifies to the eternity of mind. In this passage, and in others
+towards the conclusion of the poem, we find the nearest approach which
+Shelley can furnish to an answer to that question which he asked in
+stanza 20--'Shall that alone which knows Be as a sword consumed before
+the sheath By sightless lightning?'
+
++Stanzas 4. to 6+--(I add here a note out of its due place, which would
+be on p. 101: at the time when it occurred to me to raise this point,
+the printing had gone too far to allow of my inserting the remark
+there.)--On considering these three stanzas collectively, it may perhaps
+be felt that the references to Milton and to Keats are more advisedly
+interdependent than my notes on the details of the stanzas suggest.
+Shelley may have wished to indicate a certain affinity between the
+inspiration of Milton as the poet of _Paradise Lost_, and that of Keats
+as the poet of _Hyperion_. Urania had had to bewail the death of Milton,
+who died old when 'the priest, the slave, and the liberticide,' outraged
+England. Now she has to bewail the death of her latest-born, Keats, who
+has died young, and (as Shelley thought) in a similarly disastrous
+condition of the national affairs. Had he not been 'struck by the
+envious wrath of man,' he might even have 'dared to climb' to the
+'bright station' occupied by Milton.--The phrase in st. 4, 'Most musical
+of mourners, weep again,' with what follows regarding grief for the loss
+of Milton, and again of Keats, is modelled upon the passage in Moschus
+(p. 65)--'This, O most musical of rivers, is thy second sorrow,--this,
+Meles, thy new woe. Of old didst thou love Homer:... now again another
+son thou weepest.' My remark upon st. 13, that there Shelley first had
+direct recourse to the Elegy of Moschus, should be modified accordingly.
+
+
+
+_Cancelled Passages of Adonais, Preface._ These are taken from Dr.
+Garnett's _Relics of Shelley_, published in 1862. He says: 'Among
+Shelley's MSS. is a fair copy of the _Defence of Poetry_, apparently
+damaged by sea-water, and illegible in many places. Being prepared for
+the printer, it is written on one side of the paper only: on the blank
+pages, but frequently undecipherable for the reason just indicated, are
+many passages intended for, but eventually omitted from, the preface to
+_Adonais_.'
+
+_I have employed my poetical compositions and publications simply as the
+instruments of that sympathy between myself and others which the ardent
+and unbounded love I cherished for my kind incited me to acquire._ This
+is an important indication of the spirit in which Shelley wrote, and
+consequently of that in which his reader should construe his writings.
+He poured out his full heart, craving for 'sympathy.' Loving mankind, he
+wished to find some love in response.
+
+_Domestic conspiracy and legal oppression_, &c. The direct reference
+here is to the action taken by Shelley's father-in-law and
+sister-in-law, Mr. and Miss Westbrook, which resulted in the decree of
+Lord Chancellor Eldon whereby Shelley was deprived of the custody of the
+two children of his first marriage. See p. 12. _As a bankrupt thief
+turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic._
+Various writers have said something of this kind. I am not sure how far
+back the sentiment can be traced; but I presume that Shelley was not the
+first. Some readers will remember a passage in the dedication to his
+_Peter Bell the Third_ (1819), which forestalled Macaulay's famous
+phrase about the 'New Zealander on the ruins of London Bridge.' Shelley
+wrote: 'In the firm expectation that, when London shall be an habitation
+of bitterns;... when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the
+nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of
+their broken arches on the solitary stream; some Transatlantic
+commentator will be weighing, in the scales of some new and unimagined
+system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges,
+and their historians, I remain,' &c.
+
+_The offence of this poor victim seems to have consisted solely in his
+intimacy with Leigh Hunt_, &c. See the remarks on p. 45. There can be no
+doubt that Shelley was substantially correct in this opinion. Not only
+the _Quarterly Review_, of which he knew, but also _Blackwood's
+Magazine_, which did not come under his notice, abused Keats because he
+was personally acquainted with Hunt, and was, in one degree or another,
+a member of the literary coterie in which Hunt held a foremost place.
+And Hunt was in bad odour with these reviews because he was a hostile
+politician, still more than because of any actual or assumed defects in
+his performances as an ordinary man of letters.
+
+_Mr. Hazlitt._ William Hazlitt was (it need scarcely be said) a
+miscellaneous writer of much influence in these years, in politics an
+advanced Liberal. A selection of his writings was issued by Mr. William
+Ireland in 1889. Keats admired Hazlitt much more than Hunt.
+
+_I wrote to him, suggesting the propriety_, &c. See pp. 14, 15.
+
+_Cancelled Passages of Adonais_ (the poem). These passages also were in
+the first instance published in the _Shelley Relics_ of Dr. Garnett.
+They come, not from the same MS. which contains the prefatory fragments,
+but from some of Shelley's notebooks.
+
++Stanza 1,+ 1. 1. _And the green paradise_, &c. The green paradise is
+the 'Emerald Isle'--Ireland. This stanza refers to Thomas Moore, and
+would have followed on after st. 30 in the body of the poem.
+
++Stanza 2,+ 1. 1. _And ever as he went he swept a lyre Of unaccustomed
+shape._ 'He' has always hitherto, I think, been understood as the 'one
+frail form' of st 31--i.e. Shelley himself. The lyre might be of
+unaccustomed shape for the purpose of indicating that Shelley's poetry
+differs very essentially, in tone and treatment, from that of other
+writers. But I incline to think that Shelley, in this stanza, refers not
+to himself but to Moore. Moore was termed a 'lyrist,' and here we are
+told about his lyre. The latter would naturally be the Irish harp, and
+therefore 'of unaccustomed shape': the concluding reference to
+'ever-during green' might again glance at the 'Emerald Isle.' As to
+Shelley, he was stated in st. 33 to be carrying 'a light spear': if he
+was constantly sweeping a lyre as well, he must have had his hands
+rather full.
+
+1. 3. _Now like the ... of impetuous fire_, &c. Shelley compares
+the strains of the lyre--the spirit of the poetry--to two things:
+(1) to a conflagration in a forest; and (2) to the rustling of wind
+among the trees. The former image may be understood to apply
+principally to the revolutionary audacity and fervour of the ideas
+expressed; the latter, to those qualities of imagination, fantasy,
+beauty, and melody, which characterise the verse. Of course all
+this would be more genuinely appropriate to Shelley himself than
+to Moore: still it would admit of _some_ application to Moore, of
+whom our poet spoke highly more than once elsewhere. The
+image of a forest on fire is more fully expressed in a passage
+from the _Lines written among the Euganean Hills_, composed by
+him in 1818:--
+
+'Now new fires from antique light
+Spring beneath the wide world's might,--
+But their spark lies dead in thee [i.e. in Padua],
+Trampled out by Tyranny,
+As the Norway woodman quells,
+In the depths of piny dells,
+One light flame among the brakes,
+While the boundless forest shakes,
+And its mighty trunks are torn,
+By the fire thus lowly born;--
+The spark beneath his feet is dead;
+He starts to see the flames it fed
+Howling through the darkened sky
+With a myriad tongues victoriously,
+And sinks down in fear;-so thou,
+O Tyranny! beholdest now
+
+
+
+Light around thee, and thou hearest
+The loud flames ascend, and fearest.
+Grovel on the earth! ay, hide
+In the dust thy purple pride!'
+
+
++Stanza 3,+ 1. 1. _And then came one of sweet and earnest looks._ It is
+sufficiently clear that this stanza, and also the fragmentary beginning
+of stanza 4, refer to Leigh Hunt--who, in the body of the Elegy, is
+introduced in st. 35. The reader will observe, on looking back to that
+stanza, that the present one could not be added on to the description of
+Hunt: it is an alternative form, ultimately rejected. Its tone is
+ultra-sentimental, and perhaps on that account it was condemned. The
+simile at the close of the present stanza is ambitious, but by no means
+felicitous.
+
++Stanza 4,+ 11. 1, 2. _His song, though very sweet, was low and faint, A
+simple strain._ It may be doubted whether this description of Hunt's
+poetry, had it been published in _Adonais_, would have been wholly
+pleasing to Hunt. Neither does it define, with any exceptional aptness,
+the particular calibre of that poetry.
+
++Stanza 5,+ 11. 1, 2. _A mighty Phantasm, half concealed In darkness
+of his own exceeding light._ It seems to have been generally
+assumed that Shelley, in this stanza, describes one more of the
+'Mountain Shepherds' (see st. 30)--viz. Coleridge. No doubt, if
+any poet or person is here indicated, it must be Coleridge: and
+the affirmative assumption is so far confirmed by the fact that in
+another poem--the _Letter to Maria Gisborne_, 1820--Shelley spoke
+of Coleridge in terms partly similar to these:--
+
+'You will see Coleridge; he who sits obscure
+In the exceeding lustre and the pure
+Intense irradiation of a mind
+Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
+Flags wearily through darkness and despair--
+A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
+A hooded eagle among blinking owls.'
+
+But the first question is--Does this cancelled stanza relate to a
+Mountain Shepherd at all? To speak of a Mountain Shepherd as
+a 'mighty Phantasm,' having an 'awful presence unrevealed,'
+seems to be taking a considerable liberty with language. To me
+it appears more likely that the stanza relates to some abstract
+impersonation--perhaps Death, or else Eternity. It is true that
+Death figures elsewhere in _Adonais_ (stanzas 7, 8, 25) under an
+aspect with which the present phrases are hardly consistent: but,
+in the case of a cancelled stanza, that counts for very little. In
+_Prometheus Unbound_ (Act ii, sc. 4) Eternity, symbolised in
+Demo-gorgon, is described in terms not wholly unlike those which we
+are now debating:--
+
+                  'I see a mighty Darkness
+Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom
+Dart round, as light from the meridian sun,
+Ungazed upon and shapeless. Neither limb,
+Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is
+A living Spirit.'
+
+As to the phrase in the cancelled stanza, 'In darkness of his own
+exceeding light,' it need hardly be observed that this is modified
+from the expression in Paradise Lost (Book 3):--
+
+'Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear.'
+
+
+1. 5. _Thunder-smoke, whose skirts were chrysolite._ Technically,
+chrysolite is synonymous with the precious stone peridot, or
+olivine--its tint is a yellowish green. But probably Shelley thought
+only of the primary meaning of the word chrysolite, 'golden-stone,' and
+his phrase as a whole comes to much the same thing as 'a cloud with a
+golden lining.'
+
++Stanza 6,+ 1. 1. _And like a sudden meteor._ We here have a
+fragmentary simile which may--or equally well may not--follow
+on as connected with St. 5. See on p. 147, for whatever it may
+be worth in illustration, the line relating to Coleridge:--
+
+'A cloud-encircled meteor of the air.'
+
+
+1. 5. _Pavilioned in its tent of light._ Shelley was fond of the word
+Pavilion, whether as substantive or as verb. See St. 50: 'Pavilioning the
+dust of him,' &c.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] See the _Life of Mrs. Shelley_, by Lucy Madox Rossetti (_Eminent
+Women Series_), published in 1890. The connexion between the two
+branches of the Shelley family is also set forth--incidentally, but with
+perfect distinctness--in Collins's _Peerage of England_(1756), vol. iii.
+p. 119. He says that Viscount Lumley (who died at some date towards
+1670) 'married Frances, daughter of Henry Shelley, of Warminghurst in
+Sussex, Esq. (a younger branch of the family seated at Michaelgrove, the
+seat of the present Sir John Shelley, Bart.).'
+
+[2] I am indebted to Mr. J. Cordy Jeaffreson for some strongly reasoned
+arguments, in private-correspondence, tending to Harriet's disculpation.
+
+[3] This line (should be '_Beneath_ the good,' &c.) is the final line of
+Gray's _Progress of Poesy_. The sense in which Shelley intends to apply
+it to _The Cenci_ may admit of some doubt. He seems to mean that _The
+Cenci_ is not equal to really good tragedies; but still is superior to
+some tragedies which have recently appeared, and which bad critics have
+dubbed great.
+
+[4] This phrase is not very clear to me. From the context ensuing, it
+might seem that the 'circumstance' which prevented Keats from staying
+with Shelley in Pisa was that his nerves were in so irritable a state as
+to prompt him to move from place to place in Italy rather than fix in
+any particular city or house.
+
+[5] Though Shelley gave this advice, which was anything but unsound, he
+is said to have taken good-naturedly some steps with a view to getting
+the volume printed. Mr. John Dix, writing in 1846, says: 'He [Shelley]
+went to Charles Richards, the printer in St. Martin's Lane, when quite
+young, about the printing a little volume of Keats's first poems.'
+
+[6] This statement is not correct--so far at least as the longer poems
+in the volume are concerned. _Isabella_ indeed was finished by April,
+1818; but _Hyperion_ was not relinquished till late in 1819, and the
+_Eve of St. Agnes_ and _Lamia_ were probably not even begun till 1819.
+
+[7] See p, 96 as to Shelley's under-rating of Keats's age. He must have
+supposed that Keats was only about twenty years old at the date when
+_Endymion_ was completed. The correct age was twenty-two.
+
+[8] The passages to which Shelley refers begin thus: 'And then the
+forest told it in a dream;' 'The rosy veils mantling the East;' 'Upon a
+weeded rock this old man sat.'
+
+[9] I do not find in Shelley's writings anything which distinctly
+modifies this opinion. However, his biographer, Captain Medwin, avers
+that Shelley valued all the poems in Keats's final volume; he cites
+especially _Isabella_ and _The Eve of St. Agnes_.
+
+[10] In books relating to Keats and Shelley the name of this gentleman
+appears repeated, without any explanation of who he was. In a MS. diary
+of Dr. John Polidori, Byron's travelling physician (my maternal uncle),
+I find the following account of Colonel Finch, whom Polidori met in
+Milan in 1816: 'Colonel Finch, an extremely pleasant, good-natured,
+well-informed, clever gentleman, spoke Italian extremely well, and was
+very well read in Italian literature. A ward of his gave a masquerade in
+London upon her coming of age. She gave to each a character in the reign
+of Queen Elizabeth to support, without the knowledge of each other; and
+received them in a saloon in proper style as Queen Elizabeth. He
+mentioned to me that Nelli had written a Life of Galileo, extremely
+fair, which, if he had money by him, he would buy, that it might be
+published. Finch is a great admirer of architecture in Italy. Mr.
+Werthern, a gentleman most peaceable and quiet I ever saw, accompanying
+Finch, whose only occupation [I understand this to mean the occupation
+of Wethern, but possibly it means of Finch] is, when he arrives at a
+town or other place, to set about sketching, and then colouring, so that
+he has perhaps the most complete collection of sketches of his tour
+possible. He invited me (taking me for an Italian), in case I went to
+England, to see him; and, hearing I was English, he pressed me much
+more,' The name 'Werthern' is not distinctly written: should it be
+'Wertheim'?
+
+[11] 'Envy' refers no doubt to hostile reviewers. 'Ingratitude' refers
+to a statement of Colonel Finch that Keats had 'been infamously treated
+by the very persons whom his generosity had rescued from want and woe.'
+It is not quite clear who were the persons alluded to by Finch. Keats's
+brother George (then in America) was presumably one: he is, however,
+regarded as having eventually cleared himself from the distressing
+imputation. I know of no one else, unless possibly the painter Haydon
+may be glanced at: as to him also the charge appears to be too severe
+and sweeping.
+
+[12] Shelley wrote another letter on 16 June--to Miss Clairmont, then in
+Florence. It contains expressions to nearly the same purport. 'I have
+received a most melancholy account of the last illness of poor Keats;
+which I will neither tell you nor send you, for it would make you too
+low-spirited. My Elegy on him is finished. I have dipped my pen in
+consuming fire to chastise his destroyers; otherwise the tone of the
+poem is solemn and exalted. I send it to the press here, and you will
+soon have a copy.'
+
+[13] As Byron is introduced into _Adonais_ as mourning for Keats, and as
+in fact he cared for Keats hardly at all, it seems possible that his
+silence was dictated by antagonism rather than by modesty.
+
+[14] _Blackwood_ seems to imply that the _Quarterly_ accused _Endymion_
+of indecency; this is not correct.
+
+[15] The reader of Keats's preface will find that this is a
+misrepresentation. Keats did not speak of any fierce hell of criticism,
+nor did he ask to remain uncriticised in order that he might write more.
+What he said was that a feeling critic would not fall foul of him for
+hoping to write good poetry in the long run, and would be aware that
+Keats's own sense of failure in _Endymion_ was as fierce a hell as he
+could be chastised by.
+
+[16] This passage of the letter had remained unpublished up to 1890. It
+then appeared in Mr. Buxton Forman's volume, _Poetry and Prose by John
+Keats_. Some authentic information as to Keats's change of feeling had,
+however, been published before.
+
+[17] This phrase is lumbering and not grammatical. The words 'I confess
+that I am unable to refuse' would be all that the meaning requires.
+
+[18] This seems to contradict the phrase in _Adonais_ (stanza 20)
+'Nought we know dies.' Probably Shelley, in the prose passage, does not
+intend 'perishes' to be accepted in the absolute sense of 'dies,' or
+'ceases to have any existence;' he means that all things undergo a
+process of deterioration and decay, leading on to some essential change
+or transmutation. The French have the word 'dêpérir' as well as 'périr':
+Shelley's 'perishes' would correspond to 'dépérit.'
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Adonais, by Shelley
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10119 ***