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.’