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