the revolving year [a phrase repeated from stanza
18], and man and woman.' Next we are told that 'what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee [me] wither.' The _persons_ who
were more particularly dear to Shelley at this time must have been (not
to mention the two children Percy Florence Shelley and Allegra
Clairmont) his wife, Miss Clairmont, Emilia Viviani, and Lieutenant and
Mrs. Williams: Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Godwin, can hardly be in question.
No doubt Shelley's acute feelings and mobile sympathies involved him in
some considerable agitations, from time to time, with all the four
ladies here named: but the strong expressions which he uses as to
attracting and repelling, crushing and withering, seem hardly likely to
have been employed by him in this personal sense, in a published book.
Perhaps therefore we shall be safest in supposing that he alludes, not
to _persons_ who are dear, but to circumstances and conditions of a more
general kind--such as are involved in his self-portraiture, stanzas
31-34.

1. 8. _'Tis Adonais calls! oh hasten thither!_ 'Thither' must mean 'to
Adonais': a laxity of expression.

+Stanza 64,+ 1. 1. _That light whose smile kindles the universe_, &c.
This is again the 'One Spirit' of stanza 43. And see, in stanza 42, the
cognate expression, 'kindles it above.'

11. 3, 4. _That benediction which the eclipsing curse Of birth can
quench not._ The curse of birth is, I think, simply the calamitous
condition of mundane life--so often referred to in this Elegy as a
condition of abjection and unhappiness. The curse of birth can eclipse
the benediction of Universal Mind, but cannot quench it: in other words,
the human mind, in its passage from the birth to the death of the body,
is still an integral portion of the Universal Mind.

1. 7. _Each are mirrors._ This is of course a grammatical
irregularity--the verb should be 'is.' It is not the only instance of
the same kind in Shelley's poetry.

1. 9. _Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality._ This does not imply
that Shelley is shortly about to die. 'Cold mortality' is that condition
in which the human mind, a portion of the Universal Mind, is united to a
mortal body: and the general sense is that the Universal Mind at this
moment beams with such effulgence upon Shelley that his mind responds to
it as if the mortal body no longer interposed any impediment.

+Stanza 55,+ 1. 1. _The breath whose might I have invoked in song._ The