With these words concludes the speech of Urania, which began
in stanza 25.
+Stanza 30,+ 1. 1. _The Mountain Shepherds_. These are contemporary
British poets, whom Shelley represents as mourning the death of Keats.
Shepherds are such familiar figures in poetry--utilized for instance in
Milton's _Lycidas_, as well as by many poets of antiquity--that the
introduction of them into Shelley's Elegy is no matter for surprise. Why
they should be '_mountain_ shepherds' is not so clear. Perhaps Shelley
meant to indicate a certain analogy between the exalted level at which
the shepherds dwelt and the exalted level at which the poets wrote. As
the shepherds do not belong to the low-country, so neither do the poets
belong to the flats of verse. Shelley may have written with a certain
degree of reference to that couplet in _Lycidas_--
'For we were nursed upon the self-same _hill_,
Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill.'
1. 2. _Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent._ The garlands or
chaplets of the mountain shepherds have become sere because (it may be
presumed) the wearers, in their grief for the mortal illness and death
of Adonais, have for some little while left them unrenewed.
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