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.