wandering and death of a lonely poet. It was himself he described, but Shelley was too stern a moralist to allow that a life lived apart from human interests was a noble one, and the title of the poem expresses this. It is Alastor- a spirit of evil, a spirit of solitude.' How wrong he felt such a life to be is seen in his next poem, the Revolt of Islam, 1817. He wrote it with the hope that men were beginning to recover from the apathy and despair into which the failure of the revolutionary ideas had thrown them, and to show them what they should strive and hope for and destroy. But it is still only a martyr's hope that the poet possesses. The two chief characters of the poem, Laon and Cythna, are both slain in their struggle against tyranny, but their sacrifice is to bring forth hereafter the fruit of freedom. The poem itself has finer passages in it than Alastor, but as a whole it is inferior to it. It is quite formless. The same year Shelley went to Italy, and renewed health and the climate gave him renewed power. Rosalind and Helen appeared, and, in 1818, Julian and Maddalo was written. The first tale circles round a social subject that interested him, the second is a. familiar conversation on the story of a madman in San Lazzaro at Venice. In it his poetry becomes more masculine, and he has for the first time won mastery over his art. The new life and joy he had now gained brought back his enthusiasm for mankind, and he broke out into the splendid lyric drama of Prometheus Unbound. Prometheus bound on his rock represents Humanity suffering under the reign of Evil impersonated in Jupiter. Asia, at the beginning of the drama separated from Prometheus, is the all-pervading Love which in loving makes the universe of nature. The time comes when Evil is overthrown. Prometheus is then delivered and united to Asia; that is, Man is wedded to the spirit in Nature, and Good is all in all. The fourth act is the choral song of the regenerated universe. It is the finest example we have of the working out in poetry of that idea of a glorious destiny for the whole of Man which Cowper introduced into English poetry. The marriage of Asia and Prometheus, of Nature and Humanity, the distinct existence of each for that purpose, is the same idea as Wordsworth's, differently expressed; and Shelley and he are the only two poets who have touched it philosophically, Wordsworth with most contemplation, Shelley with most imagination. Shelley's poetry of Man reached its height in Prometheus Unbound, and he turned now to try his matured power upon other subjects. Two of these were neither personal nor for the sake of man. The first was the drama of the Cenci, the gravest and noblest tragedy since Webster wrote, which we possess. It is as restrained in expression as the previous poem is exuberant; yet there is no other poem of Shelley's in which passion and thought and imagery are so wrought together. The second was the Adonais, a lament for the death of John Keats. It is a poem written by one who seems a spirit about a spirit, belonging in expression, thought, and feeling to that world above the senses in which Shelley habitually lived. Of all this class of poems, to which many of his lyrics belong, Epipsychidion is the most impalpable, but, to those who care for Shelley's ethereal world, the finest, poem he ever wrote. No critic can ever comprehend it; it is the artist's poem, and all Shelley's philosophy of life is contained in it. Of the same class is the Witch of Atlas, the poem in which he has personified divine Imagination in her work in poetry and all her attendants and all her doings among men. As a lyric poet, Shelley, on his own ground, is easily great. Some of the lyrics are purely personal; some, as in the very finest, the Ode to the West Wind, mingle together personal feelings and prophetic hopes for Man. Some are lyrics of Nature; some are dedicated to the rebuke of tyranny and the cause of liberty; others belong to the passion of love, and others are written on the shadows of dim dreams of thought. They form together the most sensitive, the most imaginative, and the most musical, but the least tangible, lyrical poetry we possess. As the poet of Nature, he had the same idea as Wordsworth, that Nature was alive; but while Wordsworth made the active principle which filled and made Nature to be Thought, Shelley made it Love. As each distinct thing in Nature had to Wordsworth a thinking spirit in it, so each thing had to Shelley a loving spirit in it; even the invisible spheres of vapor sucked by the sun from the forest pool had each its indwelling spirit. We feel, then, that Shelley as well as Wordsworth, and for a similar reason, could give a special love to, and therefore describe vividly, each thing he saw. He wants the closeness of grasp of nature which Wordsworth and Keats had, but he had the power in a far greater degree than they of describing a vast landscape melting into indefinite distance. In this he stands first among English poets, and is in poetry what Turner was in landscape painting. Towards the end of his life, his poetry became overloaded with mystical metaphysics. What he might have been we cannot tell, for at the age of thirty he left us, drowned in the sea he loved, washed up and burned on the sandy spits near Pisa. His ashes lie beneath the walls of Rome, and Cor cordium, Heart of hearts,' written on his tomb, well says what all who love poetry feel when they think of him." "As a poet, Shelley contributed a new quality to English literaturea quality of ideality, freedom, and spiritual audacity which severe critics of other nations think we lack. Whether we consider his minor songs, his odes, or his more complicated choral dramas, we acknowledge that he was the loftiest and the most spontaneous singer of our language. In range of power also he was conspicuous above the rest. Not only did he write the best lyrics but the best tragedy, the best translations, and the best familiar poems of his century. While his genius was so varied and its flight so unapproached in swiftness, it would be vain to deny that Shelley, as an artist, had faults. The most prominent of these are haste, incoherence, verbal carelessness, incompleteness, a want of narrative force, and a weak hold on objective realities In his eager self-abandonment to inspiration, he produced much that is unsatisfactory simply because it is not ripe. There was no defect of power in him, but a defect of patience; and the final word to be pronounced in estimating the larger bulk of his poetry is the word immature. Not only was the poet young but the fruit of his young mind had been plucked before it had been duly mellowed by reflection. He did not care enough for common things to present them with artistic fulness. He was intolerant of detail, and thus failed to model with the roundness that we find in Goethe's work. He flew at the grand, the spacious, the sublime, and did not always succeed in realizing for his readers what he had imagined. A certain want of faith in his own powers prevented him from finishing what he began. Some of these defects were in a great measure the correlative of his chief quality-ideality. He composed with all his faculties, mental, emotional, and physical, at the utmost strain, at a white heat of intense fervor, striving to attain one object-the truest and most passionate investiture for the thoughts which had inflamed his ever-quick imagination. The result is, that his finest work has more the stamp of something natural and elemental-the wind, the sea, the depth of air-than of a mere artistic product. Plato would have said the Muses filled this man with sacred madness, and when he wrote, he was no longer in his own control. There was, moreover, ever-present in his nature an effort, an aspiration after a better than the best this world can show which prompted him to blend the choicest products of his thought and fancy with the fairest images borrowed from the earth on which he lived. This persistent upward striving, this earnestness, this passionate intensity, this piety of soul, and purity of inspiration, give a quite unique spirituality to his poems."-John A. Symonds. BIBLIOGRAPHY. SHELLEY.-W. M. Rossetti's Memoir of; Eng. Men of Let. Series; W. Bagehot's Estimates, etc.; De Quincey's Essays on the Poets; Howitt's Homes of Brit. Poets; Ward's Anthology; L. Hunt's Memoirs of; J. L. Peacock's Works; At. Mo., v. 6, 1860; and 11, 1863; Macmillan, Nov., 1860; Black. Mag., v. 111, 1812; Dub. U. Mag., v. 67, 1866; Harper's Mo., v. 38; Nat. Rev., v. 16, 1863; N. Br. Rev., v. 34, 1861; Quar. Rev., v. 110, 1861; West Rev., v. 69, 1858; New Mo. Mag., vs. 34, 35, and 38; Ecl. Mag., May, 1879, and Aug., 1880. Shelley's The Cloud. I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid From my wings are shaken the dews that waken When rocked to rest on their Mother's breast, I wield the flail of the lashing hail, I sift the snow on the mountains below, While I sleep in the arms of the Blast. In a tavern under is fettered the Thunder, Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion Lured by the love of the genii that move Over the rills and the crags and the hills, Wherever he dream under mountain or stream And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile, The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack When the morning-star shines dead: As on the jag of a mountain-crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings. And, when Sunset may breathe from the lit sea beneath Its ardors of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of heaven above, With wings folded I rest on mine airy nest, As still as a brooding dove. |