No doubt Shelley’s acute feelings and mobile sympathies involved him in some considerable agitations, from time to time, with all the four ladies here named:  but the strong expressions which he uses as to attracting and repelling, crushing and withering, seem hardly likely to have been employed by him in this personal sense, in a published book.  Perhaps therefore we shall be safest in supposing that he alludes, not to persons who are dear, but to circumstances and conditions of a more general kind—­such as are involved in his self-portraiture, stanzas 31-34.

1. 8. ’Tis Adonais calls! oh hasten thither! ‘Thither’ must mean ’to Adonais’:  a laxity of expression.

+Stanza 64,+ 1. 1. That light whose smile kindles the universe, &c.  This is again the ‘One Spirit’ of stanza 43.  And see, in stanza 42, the cognate expression, ‘kindles it above.’

11. 3, 4. That benediction which the eclipsing curse Of birth can quench not. The curse of birth is, I think, simply the calamitous condition of mundane life—­so often referred to in this Elegy as a condition of abjection and unhappiness.  The curse of birth can eclipse the benediction of Universal Mind, but cannot quench it:  in other words, the human mind, in its passage from the birth to the death of the body, is still an integral portion of the Universal Mind.

1. 7. Each are mirrors. This is of course a grammatical irregularity—­the verb should be ‘is.’  It is not the only instance of the same kind in Shelley’s poetry.

1. 9. Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality. This does not imply that Shelley is shortly about to die.  ‘Cold mortality’ is that condition in which the human mind, a portion of the Universal Mind, is united to a mortal body:  and the general sense is that the Universal Mind at this moment beams with such effulgence upon Shelley that his mind responds to it as if the mortal body no longer interposed any impediment.

+Stanza 55,+ 1. 1. The breath whose might I have invoked in song. The breath or afflatus of the Universal Mind.  It has been ‘invoked in song’ throughout the whole later section of this Elegy, from stanza 38 onwards.

1. 2. My spirits bark is driven, &c.  As was observed with reference to the preceding stanza, line 9, this phrase does not forecast the author’s death:  it only re-emphasises the abnormal illumination of his mind by the Universal Mind—­as if his spirit (like that of Keats) ’had flowed back to the burning fountain whence it came, a portion of the Eternal’ (stanza 38).  Nevertheless, it is very remarkable that this image of ’the spirit’s bark,’ beaconed by ‘the soul of Adonais,’ should have been written so soon before Shelley’s death by drowning, which occurred on 8 July, 1822,—­but little more than a year after he had completed this Elegy.  Besides this passage, there are in Shelley’s writings, both verse and prose, several other passages noticeable on the same account—­relating to drowning, and sometimes with a strong personal application; and in various instances he was in imminent danger of this mode of death before the end came.