11. 3, 4. Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given. In saying that his spirit’s bark is driven far from the shore, Shelley apparently means that his mind, in speculation and aspiration, ranges far beyond those mundane and material interests with which the mass of men are ordinarily concerned.  ’The trembling throng’ is, I think, a throng of men:  though it might be a throng of barks, contrasted with ‘my spirit’s bark.’  Their sails ’were never to the tempest given,’ in the sense that they never set forth on a bold ideal or spiritual adventure, abandoning themselves to the stress and sway of a spiritual storm.

1. 5. The massy earth, &c.  As the poet launches forth on his voyage upon the ocean of mind, the earth behind him seems to gape, and the sky above him to open:  his course however is still held on in darkness—­the arcanum is hardly or not at all revealed.

1. 7. Whilst burning through the inmost veil, &c.  A star pilots his course:  it is the soul of Adonais, which, being still ’a portion of the Eternal’ (st. 38), is in ‘the abode where the Eternal are,’ and testifies to the eternity of mind.  In this passage, and in others towards the conclusion of the poem, we find the nearest approach which Shelley can furnish to an answer to that question which he asked in stanza 20—­’Shall that alone which knows Be as a sword consumed before the sheath By sightless lightning?’

+Stanzas 4. to 6+—­(I add here a note out of its due place, which would be on p. 101:  at the time when it occurred to me to raise this point, the printing had gone too far to allow of my inserting the remark there.)—­On considering these three stanzas collectively, it may perhaps be felt that the references to Milton and to Keats are more advisedly interdependent than my notes on the details of the stanzas suggest.  Shelley may have wished to indicate a certain affinity between the inspiration of Milton as the poet of Paradise Lost, and that of Keats as the poet of Hyperion.  Urania had had to bewail the death of Milton, who died old when ‘the priest, the slave, and the liberticide,’ outraged England.  Now she has to bewail the death of her latest-born, Keats, who has died young, and (as Shelley thought) in a similarly disastrous condition of the national affairs.  Had he not been ’struck by the envious wrath of man,’ he might even have ‘dared to climb’ to the ‘bright station’ occupied by Milton.—­The phrase in st. 4, ’Most musical of mourners, weep again,’ with what follows regarding grief for the loss of Milton, and again of Keats, is modelled upon the passage in Moschus (p. 65)—­’This, O most musical of rivers, is thy second sorrow,—­this, Meles, thy new woe.  Of old didst thou love Homer:... now again another son thou weepest.’  My remark upon st. 13, that there Shelley first had direct recourse to the Elegy of Moschus, should be modified accordingly.