pipsychidion" seems Platonic, it will not square with
the "Symposium." Plato treats the love of a beautiful person as a mere
initiation into divine mysteries, the first step in the ladder that
ascends to heaven. When a man has formed a just conception of the
universal beauty, he looks back with a smile upon those who find their
soul's sphere in the love of some mere mortal object. Tested by this
standard, Shelley's identification of Intellectual Beauty with so many
daughters of earth, and his worshipping love of Emilia, is a spurious
Platonism. Plato would have said that to seek the Idea of Beauty in
Emilia Viviani was a retrogressive step. All that she could do, would be
to quicken the soul's sense of beauty, to stir it from its lethargy, and
to make it divine the eternal reality of beauty in the supersensual
world of thought. This Shelley had already acknowledged in the "Hymn;"
and this he emphasizes in these words:--"The error consists in seeking
in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal."

The fragments and cancelled passages published in Forman's edition do
not throw much light upon "Epipsychidion." The longest, entitled "To his
Genius" by its first editor, Mr. Garnett, reads like the induction to a
poem conceived and written in a different key, and at a lower level of
inspiration. It has, however, this extraordinary interest, that it deals
with a love which is both love and friendship, above sex, spiritual,
unintelligible to the world at large. Thus the fragment enables the
student better to realize the kind of worship so passionately expressed
in "Epipsychidion."

The news of Keats's death at Rome on the 27th of December, 1820, and the
erroneous belief that it had been accelerated, if not caused, by a
contemptible review of "Endymion" in the "Quarterly", stirred Shelley to
the composition of "Adonais". He had it printed at Pisa, and sent copies
to Ollier for circulation in London. This poem was a favourite with its
author, who hoped not only that it might find acceptance with the
public, but also that it would confer lustre upon the memory of a poet
whom he sincerely admired. No criticisms upon Shelley's works are half
so good as his own. It is, therefore, interesting to collect the
passages in which he speaks of an elegy only equalled in our language by
"Lycidas", and in the point of passionate eloquence even superior to
Milton's youthful lament for his friend. "The 'Adonais', in spite of its