apart—­a herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter’s dart; in Keats’s fate, he wept his own; his brow was branded and ensanguined.  Most of these attributes can be summed up under one heading—­that of extreme sensitiveness and susceptibility, which meet with no response or sustainment, but rather with misjudgment, repulse, and outrage.  Some readers may think that Shelley insists upon this aspect of his character to a degree rather excessive, and dangerously near the confines of feminine sensibility, rather than virile fortitude.  Apart from this predominant type of character, Shelley describes his spirit as ’beautiful and swift’—­which surely it was:  and he says that, having gazed upon Nature’s naked loveliness, he had suffered the fate of a second Actseon, fleeing ‘o’er the world’s wilderness,’ and pursued by his own thoughts like raging hounds.  By this expression Shelley apparently means that he had over-boldly tried to fathom the depths of things and of mind, but, baffled and dismayed in the effort, suffered, as a man living among men, by the very tension and vividness of his thoughts, and their daring in expression.  See what he says of himself, in prose, on p. 92.

11. 4, 5. He, as I guess, Had gazed, &c.  The use of the verb ‘guess’ in the sense of ‘to surmise, conjecture, infer,’ is now mostly counted as an Americanism.  This is not correct; for the verb has often been thus used by standard English authors.  Such a practice was not however common in Shelley’s time, and he may have been guided chiefly by the rhyming.

+Stanza 32,+ 1. 4. The weight of the superincumbent hour. This line is scarcely rhythmical:  to bring it within the ordinary scheme of ryhthm, one would have to lay an exaggerated stress on two of its feet—­’the superincumbent.’  Neither this treatment of the line, nor the line itself apart from this treatment, can easily be justified.

+Stanza 33,+ 11. 1, 2. His head was bound with pansies overblown, And faded violets. The pansy is the flower of thought, or memory:  we commonly call it heartsease, but Shelley no doubt uses it here with a different, or indeed contrary, meaning.  The violet indicates modesty.  A stanza from one of his lyrics may be appropriately cited—­Remembrance, dated 1821:—­

’Lilies for a bridal bed,
Roses for a matron’s head,
Violets for a maiden dead,
Pansies let my flowers be. 
  On the living grave I bear
  Scatter them without a tear;
  Let no friend, however dear,
Waste a hope, a fear, for me.’

1. 3. A light spear topped with a cypress cone. The funereal cypress explains itself.

1. 4. Dark ivy tresses. The ivy indicates constancy in friendship.

+Stanza 34,+ 1. 1. His partial moan. The epithet ‘partial’ is accounted for by what immediately follows—­viz. that Shelley ’in another’s fate now wept his own.’  He, like Keats, was the object of critical virulence, and he was wont (but on very different grounds) to anticipate an early death.  See (on p. 34) the expression in a letter from Shelley—­’a writer who, however he may differ,’ &c.