1. 8. _His clear sprite._ To substitute the word 'sprite' for 'spirit,' in an elevated passage referring to Milton, appears to me one of the least tolerable instances of make-rhyme in the whole range of English poetry. 'Sprite' is a trivial and distorted misformation of 'spirit'; and can only, I apprehend, be used with some propriety (at any rate, in modern poetry) in a more or less bantering sense. The tricksy elf Puck may be a sprite, or even the fantastic creation Ariel; but neither Milton's Satan nor Milton's Ithuriel, nor surely Milton himself, could possibly be a sprite, while the limits of language and of common sense are observed. 1. 9. _The third among the Sons of Light._ At first sight this phrase might seem to mean 'the third-greatest poet of the world': in which case one might suppose Homer and Shakespear to be ranked as the first and second. But it may be regarded as tolerably clear that Shelley is here thinking only of _epic_ poets; and that he ranges the epic poets according to a criterion of his own, which is thus expressed in his _Defence of Poetry_ (written in the same year as _Adonais_, 1821): 'Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet; that is, the second poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it--developing itself in correspondence with their development....Milton was the third epic poet.' The poets whom Shelley admired most were probably Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespear, and Milton; he took high delight in the _Book of Job_, and presumably in some other poetical books of the Old Testament; Calderon also he prized greatly; and in his own time Goethe, Byron, and (on some grounds) Wordsworth and Coleridge. +Stanza 5,+ 1. 2. _Not all to that bright station dared to climb._ The conception embodied in the diction of this stanza is not quite so clear as might be wished. The first statement seems to amount to this--That some poets, true poets though they were, did not aspire so high, nor were capable of reaching so high, as Homer, Dante, and Milton, the typical epic poets. A statement so obviously true that it hardly extends, in itself, beyond a truism. But it must be read as introductory to what follows. 1. 3. _And happier they their happiness who knew._ Clearly a recast of the phrase of Vergil, 'O fortunati nimium sua si bona nôrint Agricolae.'