1. 7. Taught, soothed, loved, honoured, the departed one. It has sometimes been maintained that Hunt, whatever may have been the personal friendship which he felt for Keats, did not, during the latter’s lifetime, champion his literary cause with so much zeal as might have been expected from his professions.  This is a point open to a good deal of discussion from both sides.  Mr. Buxton Forman, who, as Editor of Keats, had occasion to investigate the matter attentively, pronounces decidedly in favour of Hunt.

+Stanza 36,+ 1. 1. Our Adonais has drunk poison. Founded on those lines of Moschus which appear as a motto to Shelley’s Elegy.  See also p. 49.

1. 2. What deaf and viperous murderer. Deaf, because insensible to the beauty of Keats’s verse; and viperous, because poisonous and malignant.  The juxtaposition of the two epithets may probably be also partly dependent on that passage in the Psalms (lviii. 4, 5) which has become proverbial:  ’They are as venomous as the poison of a serpent:  even like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ears; which refuseth to hear the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely.’

1. 4. The nameless worm. A worm, as being one of the lowest forms of life, is constantly used as a term implying contempt; but it may be assumed that Shelley here uses ‘worm’ in its original sense, that of any crawling creature, more especially of the snake kind.  There would thus be no departure from the previous epithet ‘viperous.’  See the remarks as to ‘reptiles,’ St. 29.

11. 5, 6. The magic tone Whose prelude, &c.  Shelley, it will be perceived, here figures Keats as a minstrel striking the lyre, and preparing to sing.  He strikes the lyre in a ‘magic tone’; the very ‘prelude’ of this was enough to command silent expectation.  This prelude is the poem of Endymion, to which the Quarterly reviewer alone (according to Shelley) was insensitive, owing to feelings of ’envy, hate, and wrong.’  The prelude was only an induction to the ’song,’—­which was eventually poured forth in the Lamia volume, and especially (as our poet opined) in Hyperion.  But now Keats’s hand is cold in death, and his lyre unstrung.  As I have already observed—­see p. 35, &c.—­Shelley was mistaken in supposing that the Quarterly Review had held a monopoly of ’envy, hate, and wrong’—­or, as one might now term them, detraction, spite, and unfairness—­in reference to Keats.

+Stanza 37,+ 1. 4. But be thyself, and know thyself to be! The precise import of this line is not, I think, entirely plain at first sight.  I conceive that we should take the line as immediately consequent upon the preceding words—­’Live thou, live!’ Premising this, one might amplify the idea as follows; ’While Keats is dead, be it thy doom, thou his deaf and viperous murderer, to live!  But thou shalt live in thine own degraded identity, and shalt thyself be conscious how degraded thou art.’  Another suggestion might be that the words ’But be thyself are equivalent to ‘Be but thyself.’