ft'--which surely it was: and he says that, having
gazed upon Nature's naked loveliness, he had suffered the fate of a
second Actseon, fleeing 'o'er the world's wilderness,' and pursued by
his own thoughts like raging hounds. By this expression Shelley
apparently means that he had over-boldly tried to fathom the depths of
things and of mind, but, baffled and dismayed in the effort, suffered,
as a man living among men, by the very tension and vividness of his
thoughts, and their daring in expression. See what he says of himself,
in prose, on p. 92.

11. 4, 5. _He, as I guess, Had gazed,_ &c. The use of the verb 'guess'
in the sense of 'to surmise, conjecture, infer,' is now mostly counted
as an Americanism. This is not correct; for the verb has often been thus
used by standard English authors. Such a practice was not however common
in Shelley's time, and he may have been guided chiefly by the rhyming.

+Stanza 32,+ 1. 4. _The weight of the superincumbent hour._ This line is
scarcely rhythmical: to bring it within the ordinary scheme of ryhthm,
one would have to lay an exaggerated stress on two of its feet--'the
superincumbent.' Neither this treatment of the line, nor the line itself
apart from this treatment, can easily be justified.

+Stanza 33,+ 11. 1, 2. _His head was bound with pansies overblown,
And faded violets._ The pansy is the flower of thought, or memory:
we commonly call it heartsease, but Shelley no doubt uses it here
with a different, or indeed contrary, meaning. The violet indicates
modesty. A stanza from one of his lyrics may be appropriately
cited--_Remembrance_, dated 1821:--

'Lilies for a bridal bed,
Roses for a matron's head,
Violets for a maiden dead,
Pansies let _my_ flowers be.
On the living grave I bear
Scatter them without a tear;
Let no friend, however dear,
Waste a hope, a fear, for me.'

1. 3. _A light spear topped with a cypress cone._ The funereal cypress
explains itself.

1. 4. _Dark ivy tresses._ The ivy indicates constancy in friendship.

+Stanza 34,+ 1. 1. _His partial moan._ The epithet 'partial' is
accounted for by what immediately follows--viz. that Shelley 'in
another's fate now wept his own.' He, like Keats, was the object of
critical virulence, and he was wont (but on very different grounds) to
anticipate an early death. See (on p. 34) the expression in a letter
from Shelley--'a writer who, however he may differ,' &c.

1. 4. _As in the accents of an unknown la