1. 63. _The poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care_. This statement of Shelley is certainly founded upon a passage in the letter (see p. 22) addressed by Colonel Finch to Mr. Gisborne. Colonel Finch said that Keats had reached Italy, 'nursing a deeply rooted disgust to life and to the world, owing to having been infamously treated by the very persons whom his generosity had rescued from want and woe.' The Colonel's statement seems (as I have previously intimated) to be rather haphazard; and Shelley's recast of it goes to a further extreme. 1. 68. _'Almost risked his own life'_ &c. The substance of the words in inverted commas is contained in Colonel Finch's letter, but Shelley does not cite verbatim. * * * * * +Stanza 1,+ 1. 1. _I weep for Adonais--he is dead._ Modelled on the opening of Bion's Elegy for Adonis. See p. 63. 1. 3. _The frost which binds so dear a head_: sc. the frost of death. 11. 4, 5. _And thou, sad Hour,... rouse thy obscure compeers._ The compeers are clearly the other Hours. Why they should be termed 'obscure' is not quite manifest. Perhaps Shelley means that the weal or woe attaching to these Hours is obscure or uncertain; or perhaps that they are comparatively obscure, undistinguished, as not being marked by any such conspicuous event as the death of Adonais. 11. 8, 9. _His fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity._ By 'eternity' we may here understand, not absolute eternity as contradistinguished from time, but an indefinite space of time, the years and the centuries. His fate and fame shall be echoed on from age to age, and shall be a light thereto. +Stanza 2,+ 1. 1. _Where wert thou, mighty Mother._ Aphrodite Urania. See pp. 51, 52. Shelley constantly uses the form 'wert' instead of 'wast.' This phrase may be modelled upon two lines near the opening of Milton's _Lycidas_-- 'Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?' 1. 2. _The shaft which flies In darkness._ As Adonis was mortally wounded by a boar's tusk, so (it is here represented) was Adonais slain by an insidiously or murderously launched dart: see p. 49. The allusion is to the truculent attack made upon Keats by the _Quarterly Review_. It is true that 'the shaft which flies in darkness' might be understood in merely a general sense, as the mysterious and unforeseen arrow of Death: but I think it clear that Shelley used the phrase in a more special sense.