+Stanza 47,+ 1. 3. Clasp with thy panting soul, &c.  The significance of this stanza—­perhaps a rather obscure one—­requires to be estimated as a whole.  Shelley summons any person who persists in mourning for Adonais to realise to his own mind what are the true terms of comparison between Adonais and himself.  After this, he says in this stanza no more about Adonais, but only about the mourner.  He calls upon the mourner to consider (1) the magnitude of the planet earth; then, using the earth as his centre, to consider (2) the whole universe of worlds, and the illimitable void of space beyond all worlds; next he is to consider (3) what he himself is—­he is confined within the day and night of our planet, and, even within those restricted limits, he is but an infinitesimal point.  After he shall have realised this to himself, and after the tension of his soul in ranging through the universe and through space shall have kindled hope after hope, wonderment and aspiration after aspiration and wonderment, then indeed will he need to keep his heart light, lest it make him sink at the contemplation of his own nullity.

1. 9. And lured thee to the brink. This phrase is not definitely accounted for in the preceding exposition.  I think Shelley means that the successive hopes kindled in the mourner by the ideas of a boundless universe of space and of spirit will have lured him to the very brink of mundane life—­to the borderland between life and death:  he will almost have been tempted to have done with life, and to explore the possibilities of death.

+Stanza 48,+ 1. 1. Or go to Rome. This is still addressed to the mourner, the ‘fond wretch’ of the preceding stanza.  He is here invited to adopt a different test for ‘knowing himself and Adonais aright’; namely, he is to visit Rome, and muse over the grave of the youthful poet.

11. 1, 2. Which is the sepulchre, Oh not of him, but of our joy. Keats is not entombed in Rome:  his poor mortal remains are there entombed, and, along with them, the joy which we felt in him as a living and breathing presence.

11. 2, 3. ’Tis nought That ages, empires, and religions, &c. Keats, and others such as he, derive no adventitious honour from being buried in Rome, amid the wreck of ages, empires, and religions:  rather they confer honour.  He is among his peers, the kings of thought, who, so far from being dragged down in the ruin of institutions, contended against that ruin, and are alone immortal while all the rest of the past has come to nought.  This consideration may be said to qualify, but not to reverse, that which is presented in stanza 7, that Keats ’bought, with price of purest breath, a grave among the eternal’; those eternal ones, buried in Rome, include many of the ‘kings of thought.’