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previous proposition, that the splendours of the firmament of time are not extinguished; and, in the most immediate application of the proposition, Keats is not extinguished--he will continue an ennobling influence upon minds struggling towards the light. +Stanza 45,+ 1. 2. _The inheritors of unfulfilled renown Rose from their thrones._ There is a grand abruptness in this phrase, which makes it--as a point of poetical or literary structure--one of the finest things in the Elegy. We are to understand (but Shelley is too great a master to formulate it in words) that Keats, as an 'inheritor of unfulfilled renown'--i.e. a great intellect cut off by death before its maturest fruits could be produced--has now arrived among his compeers: they rise from their thrones to welcome him. In this connexion Shelley chooses to regard Keats as still a living spiritual personality--not simply as 'made one with Nature.' He is one of those 'splendours of the firmament of time' who 'may be eclipsed, but are extinguished not.' 11. 3-5. _Chatterton Rose pale, his solemn agony had not Yet faded from him._ For precocity and exceptional turn of genius Chatterton was certainly one of the most extraordinary of 'the inheritors of unfulfilled renown'; indeed, the most extraordinary: he committed suicide by poison in 1770, before completing the eighteenth year of his age. His supposititious modern-antique _Poems of Rowley_ may, as actual achievements, have been sometimes overpraised: but at the lowest estimate they have beauties and excellences of the most startling kind. He wrote besides a quantity of verse and prose, of a totally different order. Keats admired Chatterton profoundly, and dedicated _Endymion_ to his memory. I cannot find that Shelley, except in _Adonais_, has left any remarks upon Chatterton: but he is said by Captain Medwin to have been, in early youth, very much impressed by his writings. 1. 5. _Sidney, as he fought_, &c. Sir Philip Sidney, author of _The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia_, the _Apology for Poetry_, and the sonnets named _Astrophel and Stella_, died in his thirty-second year, of a wound received in the battle of Zutphen, 1586. Shelley intimates that Sidney maintained the character of being 'sublimely mild' in fighting, falling (dying), and loving, as well as generally in living. The special references appear to be these. (1) Sidney, observing that the Lord Marshal, the Earl of Leicester, had entered the field of
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