[325] 322 l. 21 Maenad: a frenzied Nymph, attendant on Dionysos in the Greek mythology. May we not call this the most vivid, sustained, and impassioned amongst all Shelley's magical personifications of Nature?
[326] — l. 5 Plants under water sympathize with the seasons of the land, and hence with the winds which affect them.
[327] 323 Written soon after the death, by shipwreck, of Wordsworth's brother John. This poem may be profitably compared with Shelley's following it. Each is the most complete expression of the innermost spirit of his art given by these great Poets:—of that Idea which, as in the case of the true Painter, (to quote the words of Reynolds,) 'subsists only in the mind: The sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it: it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always labouring to impart, and which he dies at last without imparting.'
[328] — the Kind: the human race.
[331] 327 the Royal Saint: Henry VI.
[331] 328 st. 4 this folk: its has been here plausibly but, perhaps, unnecessarily, conjectured.—Every one knows the general story of the Italian Renaissance, of the Revival of Letters.—From Petrarch's day to our own, that ancient world has renewed its youth: Poets and artists, students and thinkers, have yielded themselves wholly to its fascination, and deeply penetrated its spirit. Yet perhaps no one more truly has vivified, whilst idealizing, the picture of Greek country life in the fancied Golden Age, than Keats in these lovely (if somewhat unequally executed) stanzas:—his quick imagination, by a kind of 'natural magic,' more than supplying the scholarship which his youth had no opportunity of gaining.
[105] 134 These stanzas are by Richard Verstegan (—c. 1635), a poet and antiquarian, published in his rare Odes (1601), under the title Our Blessed Ladies Lullaby, and reprinted by Mr. Orby Shipley in his beautiful Carmina Mariana (1893). The four stanzas here given form the opening of a hymn of twenty-four.