I wrote to him, suggesting the propriety, &c.  See pp. 14, 15.

Cancelled Passages of Adonais (the poem).  These passages also were in the first instance published in the Shelley Relics of Dr. Garnett.  They come, not from the same MS. which contains the prefatory fragments, but from some of Shelley’s notebooks.

+Stanza 1,+ 1. 1. And the green paradise, &c.  The green paradise is the ’Emerald Isle’—­Ireland.  This stanza refers to Thomas Moore, and would have followed on after st. 30 in the body of the poem.

+Stanza 2,+ 1. 1. And ever as he went he swept a lyre Of unaccustomed shape. ‘He’ has always hitherto, I think, been understood as the ’one frail form’ of st 31—­i.e.  Shelley himself.  The lyre might be of unaccustomed shape for the purpose of indicating that Shelley’s poetry differs very essentially, in tone and treatment, from that of other writers.  But I incline to think that Shelley, in this stanza, refers not to himself but to Moore.  Moore was termed a ‘lyrist,’ and here we are told about his lyre.  The latter would naturally be the Irish harp, and therefore ‘of unaccustomed shape’:  the concluding reference to ‘ever-during green’ might again glance at the ‘Emerald Isle.’  As to Shelley, he was stated in st. 33 to be carrying ‘a light spear’:  if he was constantly sweeping a lyre as well, he must have had his hands rather full.

1. 3. Now like the ... of impetuous fire, &c.  Shelley compares the strains of the lyre—­the spirit of the poetry—­to two things:  (1) to a conflagration in a forest; and (2) to the rustling of wind among the trees.  The former image may be understood to apply principally to the revolutionary audacity and fervour of the ideas expressed; the latter, to those qualities of imagination, fantasy, beauty, and melody, which characterise the verse.  Of course all this would be more genuinely appropriate to Shelley himself than to Moore:  still it would admit of some application to Moore, of whom our poet spoke highly more than once elsewhere.  The image of a forest on fire is more fully expressed in a passage from the Lines written among the Euganean Hills, composed by him in 1818:—­

’Now new fires from antique light
Spring beneath the wide world’s might,—­
But their spark lies dead in thee [i.e. in Padua],
Trampled out by Tyranny,
As the Norway woodman quells,
In the depths of piny dells,
One light flame among the brakes,
While the boundless forest shakes,
And its mighty trunks are torn,
By the fire thus lowly born;—­
The spark beneath his feet is dead;
He starts to see the flames it fed
Howling through the darkened sky
With a myriad tongues victoriously,
And sinks down in fear;-so thou,
O Tyranny! beholdest now

Light around thee, and thou hearest
The loud flames ascend, and fearest. 
Grovel on the earth! ay, hide
In the dust thy purple pride!’