Many
of my readers will recollect that Milton, in the elaborate address which
opens Book 7 of _Paradise Lost_, invokes Urania. He is careful however
to say that he does not mean the Muse Urania, but the spirit of
'Celestial Song,' sister of Eternal Wisdom, both of them well-pleasing
to the 'Almighty Father.' Thus far for Urania the Muse.
I now come to Aphrodite Urania. This deity is to be carefully
distinguished from the Cyprian or Pandemic Aphrodite: she is different,
not only in attribute and function, but even in personality and origin.
She is the daughter of Heaven (Uranus) and Light; her influence is
heavenly: she is heavenly or spiritual love, as distinct from earthly or
carnal love. If the personage in Shelley's Elegy is to be regarded, not
as the Muse Urania, but as Aphrodite Urania, she here represents
spiritual or intellectual aspiration, the love of abstract beauty, the
divine element in poesy or art. As such, Aphrodite Urania would be no
less appropriate than Urania or any other Muse to be designated as the
mother of Adonais (Keats). But the more cogent argument in favour of
Aphrodite Urania is to be based upon grounds of analogy or transfer,
rather than upon any reasons of antecedent probability.
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