In this passage, and in others
towards the conclusion of the poem, we find the nearest approach which
Shelley can furnish to an answer to that question which he asked in
stanza 20--'Shall that alone which knows Be as a sword consumed before
the sheath By sightless lightning?'
+Stanzas 4. to 6+--(I add here a note out of its due place, which would
be on p. 101: at the time when it occurred to me to raise this point,
the printing had gone too far to allow of my inserting the remark
there.)--On considering these three stanzas collectively, it may perhaps
be felt that the references to Milton and to Keats are more advisedly
interdependent than my notes on the details of the stanzas suggest.
Shelley may have wished to indicate a certain affinity between the
inspiration of Milton as the poet of _Paradise Lost_, and that of Keats
as the poet of _Hyperion_. Urania had had to bewail the death of Milton,
who died old when 'the priest, the slave, and the liberticide,' outraged
England. Now she has to bewail the death of her latest-born, Keats, who
has died young, and (as Shelley thought) in a similarly disastrous
condition of the national affairs.
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