of the subject; their expression is not, as in "Lycidas," a splendid
excrescence. There is no such example of sustained eloquence in
"Lycidas" as the seven concluding stanzas of "Adonais" beginning, "Go
thou to Rome." But the balance is redressed by the fact that the
beauties of "Adonais" are the inimitable. Shelley's eloquence is even
too splendid for elegy. It wants the dainty thrills and tremors of
subtle versification, and the witcheries of verbal magic in which
"Lycidas" is so rich--"the opening eyelids of the morn;" "smooth-sliding
Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds;" Camus's garment, "inwrought with
figures dim;" "the great vision of the guarded mount;" "the tender stops
of various quills;" "with eager thought warbling his Doric lay." It will
be noticed that these exquisite phrases have little to do with Lycidas
himself, and it is a fact not to be ignored, that though Milton and
Shelley doubtless felt more deeply than Dryden when he composed his
scarcely inferior threnody on Anne Killegrew, whom he had never seen,
both might have found subjects of grief that touched them more nearly.
Shelley tells us frankly that "in another's woe he wept his own." We
cannot doubt of whom Milton was thinking when he wrote:

"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise,
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life. 'But not the praise,'
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears;
'Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies;