+Stanza 53,+ 1. 2. _Thy hopes are gone before_, &c. This stanza contains some very pointed references to the state of Shelley's feelings at the time when he was writing _Adonais_; pointed, but not so clearly defined as to make his actual meaning transparent. We are told that his hopes are gone before (i.e. have vanished before the close of his life has come), and have departed from all things here. This may partly refer to the deaths of William Shelley and of Keats; but I think the purport of the phrase extends further, and implies that Shelley's hopes generally--those animating conceptions which had inspired him in early youth, and had buoyed him up through many adversities--are now waning in disappointment. This is confirmed by the ensuing statement--that 'a light is past from 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.