The reference is to the famous last lines of Paradise Lost in which Adam and Eve forever
depart Eden (XII.646-49). That the Creature speaks in these elegiac tones suggests
that, for him, this is the moment in which he can no longer define himself, as he
did in his appeal to the elder De Lacey (II:7:26), as a being of innocent and benevolent
disposition. A second Adam, he has experienced his fall.

The Creature's imagery tends to be poetic and generally, as is the case here or in
his description of Safie's singing three paragraphs before, where he compares her
to a nightingale, his imagery is drawn from nature. In his temperament he seems, interestingly,
to be something of a cross between Elizabeth, with her love of nature, and Clerval,
with his refined poetic sensibility. Victor, of course, does not intrude upon the
narrative he is recounting to note such linkages nor, indeed, the irony of the internal
delicacy of the figure he so brutishly names.

William Frankenstein is some seven years old. Infancy thus here means "childhood."

A second echo of Byron's Manfred (1817) in this chapter:

Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,
The tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
—1.1.10-12

All women, no matter their class, in the eighteenth century were expected to do embroidery,
called "work," while otherwise unoccupied. It would seem so natural to Mary Shelley's
readership that she would have no need to name the occupation.

A famous early Athenian poet and author of its constitution, Solon is credited with
the maxim, "Count no man happy until he is dead." His life appears in Plutarch.

Romulus and Theseus are also the subject of comparative treatment but, unlike the
first three figures mentioned by the Creature, one that is essentially negative. Romulus
murdered his brother, Theseus his father, and both were likewise violent toward women.
The Creature thus testifies to his essentially pacific nature and his admiration for
gentle and socially conscious figures.

In his brief course of reading the Creature has encountered a surprising number of
examples of alienation, martyrdom, and victimization. These are states, however uneviable
they may be, that at least testify to social and political relationships. His solitude,
in contrast, has been utter.

In returning us to the sublime Alpine landscape in which she sets the second volume
of her novel, Mary Shelley makes us realize how deeply internalized as psychological
reality, for both Victor and his Creature, its sublimity has become.

Felix's daring to right an injustice in which he is in no way personally involved,
and to do so by himself transgressing legal strictures, in retrospect recalls to us
the contrasting silence and inaction of Victor Frankenstein and the bland acquiescence
of his father before the similar injustice of Justine's condemnation.

The freshness of the Creature's emotional response to nature and to beauty, which
operates as a signal testimony to his unambiguous humanity and his inner capaciousness,
carries an increasingly ironic import where no one else will acknowledge his claims
to be human.