im accordingly.
Carnal relationship and carnal love are transposed into spiritual
relationship and spiritual love. The hands are the hands, in both poems,
of Aphrodite: the voices are respectively those of Cypris and of Urania.

It is also worth observing that the fragmentary poem of Shelley named
_Prince Athanase_, written in 1817, was at first named _Pandemos and
Urania_; and was intended, as Mrs. Shelley informs us, to embody the
contrast between 'the earthly and unworthy Venus,' and the nobler ideal
of love, the heaven-born or heaven-sent Venus. The poem would thus have
borne a certain relation to _Alastor_, and also to _Epipsychidion_. The
use of the name 'Urania' in this proposed title may help to confirm us
in the belief that there is no reason why Shelley should not have used
the same name in _Adonais_ with the implied meaning of Aphrodite Urania.

On the whole I am strongly of opinion that the Urania of _Adonais_ is
Aphrodite, and not the Muse.

ADONAIS:

GENERAL EXPOSITION.

The consideration which, in the preceding section, we have bestowed upon
the 'Argument' of _Adonais_ will assist us not a little in grasping the
full scope of the poem. It may be broadly divided into three currents of
thought, or (as one might say) into three acts of passion. I. The sense
of grievous loss in the death of John Keats the youthful and aspiring
poet, cut short as he was approaching his prime; and the instinctive
impulse to mourning and desolation. 2. The mythical or symbolic
embodiment of the events in the laments of Urania and the Mountain
Shepherds, and in the denunciation of the ruthless destroyer of the
peace and life of Adonais. 3. The rejection of mourning as one-sided,
ignorant, and a reversal of the true estimate of the facts; and a
recognition of the eternal destiny of Keats in the world of mind,
coupled with the yearning of Shelley to have done with the vain shows of
things in this cycle of mortality, and to be at one with Keats in the
mansions of the everlasting. Such is the evolution of this Elegy; from
mourning to rapture: from a purblind consideration of deathly phenomena
to the illumination of the individual spirit which contemplates the
eternity of spirit as the universal substance.

Shelley raises in his poem a very marked contrast between the death of
Adonais (Keats) as a mortal man succumbing to 'the common fate,' and the
immortality of his spirit as a vital immaterial essence surviving the
de