For what is the
praise of cockneys but disgrace, or what honourable inscription can be
placed over the dead by the hands of notorious libellers, exiled
adulterers, and avowed atheists.
Adonais, an Elegy, is the form in which Mr. Shelley puts forth his woes.
We give a verse at random, premising that there is no story in the
elegy, and that it consists of fifty-five stanzas, which are, to our
seeming, altogether unconnected, interjectional, and nonsensical. We
give one that we think among the more comprehensible. An address to
Urania:--
"Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb;
And _happier they their happiness who knew_,
Whose _tapers yet burn thro' that night of time
In which suns perish'd_; Others more sublime,
Struck by the _envious_ wroth of man or GOD!!
_Have sunk extinct in their refulgent prime_;
And some yet live," &c.----
Now what is the meaning of this, or of any sentence of it, except indeed
that horrid blasphemy which attributes crime to the Great Author of all
virtue! The rest is mere empty absurdity.
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