And, at the end, how beautifully appropriate the demeanour of the two females after their condemnation!-the one high-minded but imaginative, superior to pain, but clinging to life, and yielding for a while to hideous and overwhelming fear-the other, who has given way at once under torture, meeting her fate with quiet and almost apathetic resignation, and bidding her fellowsufferer It is altogether among those miracles of genius, which no philosophy can account for, and no criticism can analyse. That one so young-so retired in his habits-so little given to that class of studies which nourishes a taste for dramatic composition -living at enmity with the world, which looked coldly on himso unaccustomed, as far as all outward evidence would suggest, to the task of reading the hearts of others-so utterly unprovided with opportunity for observing their language and demeanour-should have written one of the first of modern tragedies, seems more nearly to fulfil the idea of poetical inspiration than any other exhibition of power. That the imaginative faculty usually appears inborn, we know; but how the dramatic talent can be acquired by intuition, is an incomprehensible thing. Familiarity with the abstract, not the concrete, seems the proper attribute of genius. The power of pure calculation appears an innate faculty in some minds; but no one ever heard of a Zerah Colburn, or Jedidiah Buxton, constructing a steam-engine by the force of unassisted genius; and just such a marvel, in our view, is the production of The Cenci,' by Shelley, at the age of six-and-twenty. It must not be forgotten that we have a scarcely less striking example of the development of the pure dramatic faculty, with the least possible aid from external influences, in one living poetess-Joanna Baillie. 'The Cenci,' however, was a solitary effort. Shelley's few friends appear to have frequently solicited him to repeat it, but always without success. Either he considered his talents in that line to be not sufficiently understood and appreciated, or he was carried away by the overpowering tendency of his mind towards idealism. The fragment, entitled Charles I,' although containing some spirited lines, is scarcely worth citing as an exception; and nothing can exceed the vagueness and feebleness of the outlines with which human personages, and topics of human interest, are sketched in to occupy the foreground in some of his poems of philosophical romance-such, for instance, as the 'Revolt of 'Islam.' The essentially unpoetical character of ideal perfection in a human subject, was ill understood by Shelley. He imagined that whatever satisfied the aspirations of the visionary, 'must serve for the purpose of the poet; and did not perceive that what Kant calls the ideal, to which we do not annex objective reality,' is not suitable matter for an art necessarily objective in character, if not in substance. To wish to realize the ideal in an example,'proceeds the Prussian philosopher in his own peculiar phraseology, as, for instance, the sage in a novel, is not feasible, 'and has moreover something absurd and little edifying in itself; 'because the natural limits, which detract continually from perfec'tion in the idea, render all illusion impossible in such an attempt, ' and thereby the good itself, which lies in the idea, becomes even suspected, and similar to a mere fiction.' This alone would be sufficient to render such a poem as the 'Revolt of Islam' unsuccessful as a work of art. But, in point of fact, the sentiments which animate it never have attained, and never will attain, the common sympathies of mankind. It is a picture of vice, and physical and moral degradation, and loathsomeness of every description, all placed to the account of religion and government; to which, in some positive form or other, the sympathies of every human being are really devoted; while every impulse of generous and self-denying emotion is connected with zeal in behalf of the coldest and most barren of abstractions, political freedom ;-that is, the mere absence of all positive principles of social union;--the idol, sometimes, of very youthful minds, which alone have force of imagination sufficient to invest so negative an image with ideal attractions, but which never drew forth a single sword in earnest, or was honoured by the devotion of a single martyr. Shelley was no politician. When he attempted to vie with the ordinary political minstrels of his time, as in the 'Masque of Anarchy,' his satire wanted point, and his vituperation hearti`ness. When he enlisted himself among the many Laureates of the unlucky constitutions which flourished and faded during his visit to Italy, his inspiration was pompous and laboured. When he endeavoured to pourtray what he deemed the corruptions of the temporal and spiritual government of the world-as in the 'Revolt ' of Islam;' or of social usages—as in 'Rosalind and Helen,' the resemblance was so distorted and unnatural, that his readers turned away rather with a sickening incredulity than with the indignation which he meant to excite. Mrs Shelley's veneration for the memory of her husband is no subject for ridicule; but it taxes our gravity to be seriously told, that, 'in the ameliorations 'that have taken place in the political state of his country, we may trace in part the operation of his arduous struggles. His VOL. LXIX. NO. CXL. 2 L spirit gathers peace in its new state, from the sense that, though late, his exertions were not made in vain, and in the 'progress of the liberty he so fondly loved!' Another quality which Shelley may be said to have had in common with other poets, from whom he differed widely in the application of it, was an extremely refined taste for ancient classical beauty. Where, as no doubt is occasionally the case, he has overlaid this true vein of elegance with spurious affectation and foppery, it is easy to trace the corruption to the influence of inferior writers, with whom circumstances brought him into connexion. It is perhaps singular, that with such a faculty for appreciating the genuine, he should ever have been seduced by the false finery of the imitation. Yet something of this mannerism is perceptible even in his classical translations;-nay, in the most beautiful of them all, that of the Hymn to Mercury.' And thus he subjected himself to the contemptuous animadversions of our classical purists;-the only school, perhaps, of very close and searching critics which we possess the only one enjoying a definite creed; men whose perceptions are obstinately closed at all avenues but one-to whom even the divinities of their own literary idolatry are scarcely divine, unless worshipped according to the canons of Dawes, and with the rites of the sixth form and the senate-house. In the eyes of these scholars, Shelley was a Cockney, liable to utter condemnation, or hardly to be saved, in spite of himself, through the merits of an Eton and Oxford education. It will be long before any of them learn the spells by which he was able to evoke the essential spirit itself, without which their gods are but fair and inanimate models of perfection. Shelley was a man of few books, but among these the Greek poets were the most familiar and the best loved-the Dramatists chief of these; and it requires little acquaintance with his poetry to discern that Sophocles was the chosen one amongst them all. 'More popular poets,' say his editor, 'clothe the ideal with fa'miliar and sensible imagery. Shelley loved to idealize the real; 'to gift the mechanism of the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also on the most delicate and ab'stract emotions and thoughts of the mind. Sophocles was his 'great master in this species of imagery.' In the 'Prometheus Unbound,' he adopts an Eschylean framework; but it is Sophocles who comes to light here and there in the choruses and other characteristic parts of the drama. Much of it, however, is scarcely referable to any standard; much, no doubt, perplexingly obscure and wandering; while there are many parts of which no other poet could have furnished the prototype; and which repre 1 sent the strange phantoms of his own imagination, mingled, as his most genuine visions almost invariably are, with a touch of vague ghastliness and terror;-such as the famous description of the Hours. 'Cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds, Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands As if the thing they loved fled on before, And now, even now, they clasp'd it. Their bright locks Sweep onward.' There is a peculiar and artificial workmanship in many of the choric odes of the Greek dramatists, and especially in those of Sophocles, which no one appears to us to have understood or imitated, in modern times, as Shelley has done. It consists in what may perhaps be termed an accumulative succession of ideas, instead of an antithetical one. Each image is connected with those which immediately precede and follow it, not by way of contrast, but by immediate dependence: each draws on the next-it is a curiously linked chain, not a string of separate pearls; the links being sometimes (not always) divided at intervals by the recurring fall of the strophe. The very beautiful 'Ode to the West Wind,' is an example of this kind of continuous imagery; and it is remarkable that the metre of that poem is very analogous to the choric arrangement of the ancient ode-far more so than the confused jingle, held together only by recurring rhymes, in which English poets generally seek to imitate the latter. It is composed of the terza rima (by the peculiar construction of which the sense is almost necessarily carried on from line to line), broken by couplets, at measured intervals, into strophic divisions. 'Thou wild west wind! thou breath of autumn's being! Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill Wild spirit, which art moving every where, Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams Beside a pumice isle in Baia's bay; All overgrown with azure moss and flowers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, We have lingered thus long over some of the minor excellences of Shelley's poetry, without daring to analyze those higher qualities on which his immortality is founded. They are to be felt, rather than criticised and lectured upon. Deeply admired he will ever be it is not to be wished, were it possible, that he should ever become extensively popular. Many causes contribute to make this impossible, as long as the common tastes and sympathies of mankind remain what they are. The utter want of human interest in all his poems, except 'The Cenci' alone, has already been referred to. So has the painfully morbid character of his imagination in some of its most ordinary moodsleading it to dwell by preference on images rather hideous than mournful;-a quality, however, we suspect, which is differently *Shelley was fond of repeating some of his more far-fetched images. The same ideas recur in the Sensitive Plant :' 'And the leaves, brown, yellow, and grey, and red, Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind past- The water-blooms under the rivulet Fell from the stalks on which they were set; |