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. The part
assigned to Urania in Shelley's Elegy is very closely modelled upon the
part assigned to Aphrodite in the Elegy of Bion upon Adonis (see the
section in this volume, _Bion and Moschus_). What Aphrodite Cypris does
in the _Adonis_, that Urania does in the _Adonais_. The resemblances are
exceedingly close, in substance and in detail: the divergences are only
such as the altered conditions naturally dictate. The Cyprian Aphrodite
is the bride of Adonis, and as such she bewails him: the Uranian
Aphrodite is the mother of Adonais, and she laments him accordingly.
Carnal relationship and carnal love are transposed into spiritual
relationship and spiritual love. The hands are the hands, in both poems,
of Aphrodite: the voices are respectively those of Cypris and of Urania.

It is also worth observing that the fragmentary poem of Shelley named
_Prince Athanase_, written in 1817, was at first named _Pandemos and
Urania_; and was intended, as Mrs. Shelley informs us, to embody the
contrast between 'the earthly and unworthy Venus,' and the nobler ideal
of love, the heaven-born or heaven-sent Venus. The poem would thus have
borne a certain relation to _Alastor_, and also to _Epipsychidion_. The
use of the name 'Urania' in this proposed title may help to confirm us