Plato would have said that to seek the Idea of Beauty in Emilia Viviani was a retrogressive step.

All that she could do, would be to quicken the soul's sense of beauty, to stir it from its lethargy, and to make it divine the eternal reality of beauty in the supersensual world of thought.

This Shelley had already acknowledged in the "Hymn;" and this he emphasizes in these words:--"The error consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal." The fragments and cancelled passages published in Forman's edition do not throw much light upon "Epipsychidion." The longest, entitled "To his Genius" by its first editor, Mr.Garnett, reads like the induction to a poem conceived and written in a different key, and at a lower level of inspiration.

It has, however, this extraordinary interest, that it deals with a love which is both love and friendship, above sex, spiritual, unintelligible to the world at large.

Thus the fragment enables the student better to realize the kind of worship so passionately expressed in "Epipsychidion." The news of Keats's death at Rome on the 27th of December, 1820, and the erroneous belief that it had been accelerated, if not caused, by a contemptible review of "Endymion" in the "Quarterly", stirred Shelley to the composition of "Adonais".