24 THE "ADONAIS" OF SHELLEY. 



be contaminated by heterodoxy or levelled at the 

 venerable institutions of society, that age, and ex- 

 perience and wisdom, have instituted for the moral 

 guidance, and mutual happiness of men. 



Coleridge or Wordsworth never touched the 

 chords of Poesy, under the inspiration of the gent- 

 ler feelings of our nature with more tenderness than 

 Shelley. In the delineation of the human affections, 

 in such states as demanded a share of our pity, 

 sorrow, or sympathy, he approached closely to the 

 pathos and fine conception of Byron. In nervous- 

 ness and the picturesque of poetry, he was not in- 

 ferior to Scott : and his " Spirit of Solitude" might 

 be referred to for language, approaching the lofty 

 sublimity of Milton. 



Yet, after all, the beauties of Shelley have re- 

 mained as a sealed book to the generality of readers, 

 and he was subjected to the well merited scourge of 

 severe criticism ; because he wove into the texture 

 of his writings principles worthy only of reproba- 

 tion and which would be a disgrace even to igno- 

 rance. 



The poem of Adonais was published at Pisa, in 

 1821, and obtained little notice, from English 

 criticism. It is an elegy written on the death 

 of John Keats, who died at Rome, in 1821, as is 

 generally supposed, of a disorder which was super- 

 induced by the effect on his mind of a critical notice 

 of his works in the Quarterly Review. 



In this poem may be found some of the greatest 

 beauties and the greatest faults of Shelley, we shall 

 confine ourselves to a few of the former, and let the 

 poet speak for himself. The elegy opens with an 

 invocation to Urania, in which the death of the 

 young bard, as one of her children, is announced : 

 the following exquisite' lines occur in the sixth and 

 seventh stanzas : 



