h began
in stanza 25.

+Stanza 30,+ 1. 1. _The Mountain Shepherds_. These are contemporary
British poets, whom Shelley represents as mourning the death of Keats.
Shepherds are such familiar figures in poetry--utilized for instance in
Milton's _Lycidas_, as well as by many poets of antiquity--that the
introduction of them into Shelley's Elegy is no matter for surprise. Why
they should be '_mountain_ shepherds' is not so clear. Perhaps Shelley
meant to indicate a certain analogy between the exalted level at which
the shepherds dwelt and the exalted level at which the poets wrote. As
the shepherds do not belong to the low-country, so neither do the poets
belong to the flats of verse. Shelley may have written with a certain
degree of reference to that couplet in _Lycidas_--

'For we were nursed upon the self-same _hill_,
Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill.'

1. 2. _Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent._ The garlands or
chaplets of the mountain shepherds have become sere because (it may be
presumed) the wearers, in their grief for the mortal illness and death
of Adonais, have for some little while left them unrenewed. Or possibly
the garlands withered at the moment when Spring 'threw down her kindling
buds' (stanza 16), I do not well understand the expression 'magic
mantles.' There seems to be no reason why the mantles of the shepherds,
considered as shepherds, should be magic. Even when we contemplate the
shepherds as poets, we may fail to discern why any magical property
should be assigned to their mantles. By the use of the epithet 'magic'
Shelley must have intended to bridge over the gap between the nominal
shepherds and the real poets, viewed as inspired singers: for this
purpose he has adopted a bold verbal expedient, but not I think an
efficient one. It may be noticed that the 'uncouth swain' who is
represented in _Lycidas_ as singing the dirge (in other words, Milton
himself) is spoken of as having a mantle--it is a 'mantle blue' (see the
penultimate line of that poem).

1. 3. _The Pilgrim of Eternity._ This is Lord Byron. As inventor of the
personage Childe Harold, the hero and so-called 'Pilgrim' of the poem
_Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_, and as being himself to a great extent
identical with his hero, Byron was frequently termed 'the Pilgrim.'
Shelley adopts this designation, which he magnifies into 'the Pilgrim of
Eternity,' He admired Byron most enthusiastically as a poet, and was
g