1. 9. Whilst thy cold embers choke, &c.  The spirit of Adonais came as a flame from the ‘burning fountain’ of the Eternal, and has now reverted thither, he being one of the ‘enduring dead.’  But the ’deaf and viperous murderer’ must not hope for a like destiny.  His spirit, after death, will be merely like ‘cold embers,’ cumbering the ‘hearth of shame.’  As a rhetorical antithesis, this serves its purpose well:  no doubt Shelley would not have pretended that it is a strictly reasoned antithesis as well, or furnishes a full account of the post-mortem fate of the Quarterly reviewer.

+Stanza 39,+ 11. 1, 2. Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!  He hath awakened from the dream of life. Shelley now proceeds boldly to declare that the state which we call death is to be preferred to that which we call life.  Keats is neither dead nor sleeping.  He used to be asleep, perturbed and tantalized by the dream which is termed life.  Having at last awakened from the dream, he is no longer asleep:  and, if life is no more than a dream, neither does the cessation of life deserve to be named death.  The transition from one emotion to another in this passage, and also in the preceding stanza, ‘Nor let us weep,’ &c., resembles the transition towards the close of Lycidas—­

’Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more, For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,’ &c.

The general view has considerable affinity to that which is expounded in a portion of Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, and which has been thus summarised.  ’Death is merely the separation of soul and body.  And this is the very consummation at which Philosophy aims:  the body hinders thought,—­the mind attains to truth by retiring into herself.  Through no bodily sense does she perceive justice, beauty, goodness, and other ideas.  The philosopher has a lifelong quarrel with bodily desires, and he should welcome the release of his soul.’

1. 3. ’Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, &c.  We, the so-called living, are in fact merely beset by a series of stormy visions which constitute life; all our efforts are expended upon mere phantoms, and are therefore profitless; our mental conflict is an act of trance, exercised upon mere nothings.  The very energetic expression, ’strike with our spirit’s knife invulnerable nothings,’ is worthy of remark.  It will be remembered that, according to Shelley’s belief, ’nothing exists but as it is perceived’:  see p. 56.  The view of life expressed with passionate force in this passage of Adonais is the same which forms the calm and placid conclusion of The Sensitive Plant, a poem written in 1820;—­

’But, in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is but all things seem. 
And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.