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.’