on one fountain of a
mourning mind._ Shelley certainly alludes to himself in this line. His
beloved son William, who died in June 1819, in the fourth year of his
age, was buried in this cemetery: the precise spot is not now known.

11. 5-7. _Too surely shalt thou find Thine own well full, if thou
returnest home, Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind_, &c.
The apposition between the word 'well' and the preceding word 'fountain'
will be observed. The person whom Shelley addresses would, on returning
home from the cemetery, find more than, ample cause, of one sort or
another, for distress and discomposure. Hence follows the conclusion
that he would do well to 'seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb': he
should prefer the condition of death to that of life. And so we reach in
stanza 51 the same result which, in stanza 47, was deduced from a
different range of considerations.

+Stanza 52,+ 1. 1. _The One remains, the many change and pass._ See the
notes on stanzas 42 and 43. 'The One' is the same as 'the One Spirit' in
stanza 43--the Universal Mind. The Universal Mind has already been
spoken of (stanza 38) as 'the Eternal.' On the other hand, 'the many'
are the individuated minds which we call 'human beings': they 'change
and pass'--the body perishing, the mind which informed it being (in
whatever sense) reabsorbed into 'the Eternal.'

1. 2. _Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly._ This is in
strictness a physical descriptive image: in application, it means the
same as the preceding line.

11. 3-5. _Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white
radiance of eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments._ Perhaps a
more daring metaphorical symbol than this has never been employed by any
poet, nor one that has a deeper or a more spacious meaning. Eternity is
figured as white light--light in its quintessence. Life, mundane life,
is as a dome of glass, which becomes many-coloured by its prismatic
diffraction of the white light: its various prisms reflect eternity at
different angles. Death ultimately tramples the glass dome into
fragments; each individual life is shattered, and the whole integer of
life, constituted of the many individual lives, is shattered. If
everything else written by Shelley were to perish, and only this
consummate image to remain--so vast in purport, so terse in form--he
would still rank as a poet of lofty imagination. _Ex pede Herculem._

11. 5, 6. _Die, If thou