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.