+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.’