us to regard Keats (Adonais) as mortal in body but immortal in soul or
mind, his real intent is probably limited to this: that Keats has been
liberated, by the death of the body, from the dominion and delusions of
the senses; and that he, while in the flesh, developed certain fruits of
mind which survive his body, and will continue to survive it
indefinitely, and will form a permanent inheritance of thought and of
beauty to succeeding generations. Keats himself, in one of his most
famous lines, expressed a like conception,


'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.'


Shelley was faithful to his canons of highest literary or poetical form
in giving a Greek shape to his elegy on Keats; but it may be allowed to
his English readers, or at any rate to some of them, to think that he
hereby fell into a certain degree of artificiality of structure,
undesirable in itself, and more especially hampering him in a plain and
self-consistent expression both of his real feeling concerning Keats,
and of his resentment against those who had cut short, or were supposed
to have cut short, the career and the poetical work of his friend.
Moreover Shelley went beyond the mere recurrence to Greek forms of
impersonation and expression: he took two particular Greek authors, and
two particular Greek poems, as his principal model. These two poems are
the Elegy of Bion on Adonis, and the Elegy of Moschus on Bion. To
imitate is not to plagiarize; and Shelley cannot reasonably be called a
plagiarist because he introduced into _Adonais_ passages which are
paraphrased or even translated from Bion and Moschus. It does seem
singular however that neither in the _Adonais_ volume nor in any of his
numerous written remarks upon the poem does Shelley ever once refer to