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 wouldst be with that which thou dost seek._ This phrase is addressed by the poet to anybody, and more especially to himself. As in stanza 38--'The pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal.' 11. 7-9. _Rome's azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak The glory thy transfuse with fitting truth to speak._ I follow here the punctuation of the Pisan edition--with a comma after 'words,' as well as after 'sky, flowers,' &c. According to this punctuation, the words of Rome, as well as her sky and other beautiful endowments, are too weak to declare at full the glory which they impart; and the inference from this rather abruptly introduced recurrence to Rome is (I suppose), that the spiritual glory faintly adumbrated by Rome can only be realised in that realm of eternity to which death gives access. Taken in this sense, the 'words' of Rome appear to mean 'the beautiful language spoken in Rome'--the Roman or Latin language, as modified into modern Italian. The pronunciation of Italian in Rome is counted peculiarly pure and rich: hence the Italian axiom, 'lingua toscana in bocca romana'--Tuscan tongue in Roman mouth. At first sight, it would seem far more natural to punctuate thus: Rome's azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music,--words are weak The glory, &c. The sense would then be--Words are too weak to declare at full the glory inherent in the sky, flowers, &c. of Rome. Yet, although this seems a more straightforward arrangement for the words of the sentence, as such, it is not clear that such a comment on the beauties of Rome would have any great relevancy in its immediate context.