Contents:

Page No 1

Page No 2

Page No 3

Page No 4

SHELLEY: AN ESSAY .....................................................................................................................................1

Francis Thompson ....................................................................................................................................1

The Church, which was once the mother of poets no less than of saints, during the last two centuries has

relinquished to aliens the chief glories of poetry, if the chief glories of holiness she has preserved for her own.

The palm and the laurel, Dominic and Dante, sanctity and song, grew together in her soil: she has retained the

palm, but forgone the laurel. Poetry in its widest sense, {1} and when not professedly irreligious, has been

too much and too long among many Catholics either misprised or distrusted; too much and too generally the

feeling has been that it is at best superfluous, at worst pernicious, most often dangerous. Once poetry was, as

she should be, the lesser sister and helpmate of the Church; the minister to the mind, as the Church to the

soul. But poetry sinned, poetry fell; and, in place of lovingly reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her from the

door to follow the feet of her pagan seducer. The separation has been ill for poetry; it has not been well for

Fathers of the Church (we would say), pastors of the Church, pious laics of the Church: you are taking from

its walls the panoply of Aquinastake also from its walls the psaltery of Alighieri. Unroll the precedents of

the Church's past; recall to your minds that Francis of Assisi was among the precursors of Dante; that sworn

to Poverty he forswore not Beauty, but discerned through the lamp Beauty the Light God; that he was even

more a poet in his miracles than in his melody; that poetry clung round the cowls of his Order. Follow his

footsteps; you who have blessings for men, have you no blessing for the birds? Recall to your memory that,

in their minor kind, the love poems of Dante shed no less honour on Catholicism than did the great religious

poem which is itself pivoted on love; that in singing of heaven he sang of Beatricethis supporting angel

was still carven on his harp even when he stirred its strings in Paradise. What you theoretically know, vividly

realise: that with many the religion of beauty must always be a passion and a power, that it is only evil when

divorced from the worship of the Primal Beauty. Poetry is the preacher to men of the earthly as you of the

Heavenly Fairness; of that earthly fairness which God has fashioned to His own image and likeness. You

proclaim the day which the Lord has made, and Poetry exults and rejoices in it. You praise the Creator for

His works, and she shows you that they are very good. Beware how you misprise this potent ally, for hers is

the art of Giotto and Dante: beware how you misprise this insidious foe, for hers is the art of modern France

and of Byron. Her value, if you know it not, God knows, and know the enemies of God. If you have no room

for her beneath the wings of the Holy One, there is place for her beneath the webs of the Evil One: whom you

discard, he embraces; whom you cast down from an honourable seat, he will advance to a haughty throne; the

brows you dislaurel of a just respect, he will bind with baleful splendours; the stone which you builders

reject, he will make his head of the corner. May she not prophesy in the temple? then there is ready for her

the tripod of Delphi. Eye her not askance if she seldom sing directly of religion: the bird gives glory to God

though it sings only of its innocent loves. Suspicion creates its own cause; distrust begets reason for distrust.

This beautiful, wild, feline Poetry, wild because left to range the wilds, restore to the hearth of your charity,

shelter under the rafter of your Faith; discipline her to the sweet restraints of your household, feed her with

the meat from your table, soften her with the amity of your children; tame her, fondle her, cherish heryou

will no longer then need to flee her. Suffer her to wanton, suffer her to play, so she play round the foot of the

There is a change of late years: the Wanderer is being called to her Father's house, but we would have the call

yet louder, we would have the proffered welcome more unstinted. There are still stray remnants of the old

intolerant distrust. It is still possible for even a French historian of the Church to enumerate among the

articles cast upon Savonarola's famous pile, poesies erotiques, tant des anciens que des modernes, livres

impies ou corrupteurs, Ovide, Tibulle, Properce, pour ne nommer que les plus connus, Dante, Petrarque,

Boccace, tous ces auteurs Italiens qui deje souillaient les ames et ruinaient les moeurs, en creant ou

perfectionnant la langue. {2} Blameworthy carelessness at the least, which can class the Vita Nuova with the

Ars Amandi and the Decameron! And among many English Catholics the spirit of poetry is still often

received with a restricted Puritanical greeting, rather than with the traditionally Catholic joyous openness.

We ask, therefore, for a larger interest, not in purely Catholic poetry, but in poetry generally, poetry in its

widest sense. With few exceptions, whatsoever in our best poets is great and good to the nonCatholic, is

great and good also to the Catholic; and though Faber threw his edition of Shelley into the fire and never

regretted the act; though, moreover, Shelley is so little read among us that we can still tolerate in our

Churches the religious parody which Faber should have thrown after his threevolumed Shelley; {3}in

spite of this, we are not disposed to number among such exceptions that straying spirit of light.

We have among us at the present day no lineal descendant, in the poetical order, of Shelley; and any such

offspring of the aboundingly spontaneous Shelley is hardly possible, still less likely, on account of the defect

by which (we think) contemporary poetry in general, as compared with the poetry of the early nineteenth

century, is mildewed. That defect is the predominance of art over inspiration, of body over soul. We do not

say the DEFECT of inspiration. The warrior is there, but he is hampered by his armour. Writers of high aim

in all branches of literature, even when they are notas Mr. Swinburne, for instance, islavish in

expression, are generally overdeliberate in expression. Mr. Henry James, delineating a fictitious writer

clearly intended to be the ideal of an artist, makes him regret that he has sometimes allowed himself to take

the secondbest word instead of searching for the best. Theoretically, of course, one ought always to try for

the best word. But practically, the habit of excessive care in word selection frequently results in loss of

spontaneity; and, still worse, the habit of always taking the best word too easily becomes the habit of always

taking the most ornate word, the word most removed from ordinary speech. In consequence of this, poetic

diction has become latterly a kaleidoscope, and one's chief curiosity is as to the precise combinations into

which the pieces will be shifted. There is, in fact, a certain band of words, the Praetorian cohorts of poetry,

whose prescriptive aid is invoked by every aspirant to the poetical purple, and without whose prescriptive aid

none dares aspire to the poetical purple; against these it is time some banner should be raised. Perhaps it is

almost impossible for a contemporary writer quite to evade the services of the freelances whom one

encounters under so many standards. {4} But it is at any rate curious to note that the literary revolution

against the despotic diction of Pope seems issuing, like political revolutions, in a despotism of its own

This, then, we cannot but think, distinguishes the literary period of Shelley from our own. It distinguishes

even the unquestionable treasures and masterpieces of today from similar treasures and masterpieces of the

precedent day; even the LotusEaters from Kubla Khan; even Rossetti's ballads from Christabel. It is

present in the restraint of Matthew Arnold no less than in the exuberance of Swinburne, and affects our

writers who aim at simplicity no less than those who seek richness. Indeed, nothing is so artificial as our

simplicity. It is the simplicity of the French stage ingenue. We are selfconscious to the fingertips; and this

inherent quality, entailing on our poetry the inevitable loss of spontaneity, ensures that whatever poets, of

whatever excellence, may be born to us from the Shelleian stock, its founder's spirit can take among us no

reincarnation. An age that is ceasing to produce childlike children cannot produce a Shelley. For both as

Yet, just as in the effete French society before the Revolution the Queen played at Arcadia, the King played

at being a mechanic, everyone played at simplicity and universal philanthropy, leaving for most durable

outcome of their philanthropy the guillotine, as the most durable outcome of ours may be execution by

electricity; so in our own society the talk of benevolence and the cult of childhood are the very fashion of

the hour. We, of this self conscious, incredulous generation, sentimentalise our children, analyse our

children, think we are endowed with a special capacity to sympathise and identify ourselves with children; we

play at being children. And the result is that we are not more childlike, but our children are less childlike.

It is so tiring to stoop to the child, so much easier to lift the child up to you. Know you what it is to be a

child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the

waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that

the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness

into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live

it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor petition that it be commuted into death. When

we become conscious in dreaming that we dream, the dream is on the point of breaking; when we become

conscious in living that we live, the ill dream is but just beginning. Now if Shelley was but too conscious of

the dream, in other respects Dryden's false and famous line might have been applied to him with very much

less than it's usual untruth. {5} To the last, in a degree uncommon even among poets, he retained the

idiosyncrasy of childhood, expanded and matured without differentiation. To the last he was the enchanted

This was, as is well known, patent in his life. It is as really, though perhaps less obviously, manifest in his

poetry, the sincere effluence of his life. And it may not, therefore, be amiss to consider whether it was

conditioned by anything beyond his congenital nature. For our part, we believe it to have been equally largely

the outcome of his early and long isolation. Men given to retirement and abstract study are notoriously liable

to contract a certain degree of childlikeness: and if this be the case when we segregate a man, how much

more when we segregate a child! It is when they are taken into the solution of schoollife that children, by

the reciprocal interchange of influence with their fellows, undergo the series of reactions which converts

them from children into boys and from boys into men. The intermediate stage must be traversed to reach the

Now Shelley never could have been a man, for he never was a boy. And the reason lay in the persecution

which overclouded his school days. Of that persecution's effect upon him, he has left us, in The Revolt of

Islam, a picture which to many or most people very probably seems a poetical exaggeration; partly because

Shelley appears to have escaped physical brutality, partly because adults are inclined to smile tenderly at

childish sorrows which are not caused by physical suffering. That he escaped for the most part bodily

violence is nothing to the purpose. It is the petty malignant annoyance recurring hour by hour, day by day,

month by month, until its accumulation becomes an agony; it is this which is the most terrible weapon that

boys have against their fellow boy, who is powerless to shun it because, unlike the man, he has virtually no

privacy. His is the torture which the ancients used, when they anointed their victim with honey and exposed

him naked to the restless fever of the flies. He is a little St. Sebastian, sinking under the incessant flight of

We do not, therefore, suspect Shelley of exaggeration: he was, no doubt, in terrible misery. Those who think

otherwise must forget their own past. Most people, we suppose, MUST forget what they were like when they

were children: otherwise they would know that the griefs of their childhood were passionate abandonment,

DECHIRANTS (to use a characteristically favourite phrase of modern French literature) as the griefs of their

maturity. Children's griefs are little, certainly; but so is the child, so is its endurance, so is its field of vision,

while its nervous impressionability is keener than ours. Grief is a matter of relativity; the sorrow should be

estimated by its proportion to the sorrower; a gash is as painful to one as an amputation to another. Pour a

puddle into a thimble, or an Atlantic into Etna; both thimble and mountain overflow. Adult fools, would not

So beset, the child fled into the tower of his own soul, and raised the drawbridge. He threw out a reserve,

encysted in which he grew to maturity unaffected by the intercourses that modify the maturity of others into

the thing we call a man. The encysted child developed until it reached years of virility, until those later

Oxford days in which Hogg encountered it; then, bursting at once from its cyst and the university, it swam

into a world not illegitimately perplexed by such a whim of the gods. It was, of course, only the completeness

and duration of this seclusion lasting from the gate of boyhood to the threshold of youthwhich was

peculiar to Shelley. Most poets, probably, like most saints, are prepared for their mission by an initial

segregation, as the seed is buried to germinate: before they can utter the oracle of poetry, they must first be

Shelley's life frequently exhibits in him the magnified child. It is seen in his fondness for apparently futile

amusements, such as the sailing of paper boats. This was, in the truest sense of the word, childlike; not, as it

is frequently called and considered, childish. That is to say, it was not a mindless triviality, but the genuine

child's power of investing little things with imaginative interest; the same power, though differently devoted,

which produced much of his poetry. Very possibly in the paper boat he saw the magic bark of Laon and

In fact, if you mark how favourite an idea, under varying forms, is this in his verse, you will perceive that all

the charmed boats which glide down the stream of his poetry are but glorified resurrections of the little paper

And the child appeared no less often in Shelley the philosopher than in Shelley the idler. It is seen in his

repellent no less than in his amiable weaknesses; in the unteachable folly of a love that made its goal its

startingpoint, and firmly expected spiritual rest from each new divinity, though it had found none from the

divinities antecedent. For we are clear that this was no mere straying of sensual appetite, but a straying,

strange and deplorable, of the spirit; that (contrary to what Mr. Coventry Patmore has said) he left a woman

not because he was tired of her arms, but because he was tired of her soul. When he found Mary Shelley

wanting, he seems to have fallen into the mistake of Wordsworth, who complained in a charming piece of

unreasonableness that his wife's love, which had been a fountain, was now only a well:

Wordsworth probably learned, what Shelley was incapable of learning, that love can never permanently be a

fountain. A living poet, in an article {6} which you almost fear to breathe upon lest you should flutter some

of the frail pastellike bloom, has said the thing: "Love itself has tidal moments, lapses and flows due to the

metrical rule of the interior heart." Elementary reason should proclaim this true. Love is an affection, its

display an emotion: love is the air, its display is the wind. An affection may be constant; an emotion can no

more be constant than the wind can constantly blow. All, therefore, that a man can reasonably ask of his wife

is that her love should be indeed a well. A well; but a Bethesdawell, into which from time to time the angel

of tenderness descends to trouble the waters for the healing of the beloved. Such a love Shelley's second wife

appears unquestionably to have given him. Nay, she was content that he should veer while she remained true;

she companioned him intellectually, shared his views, entered into his aspirations, and yetyet, even at the

date of Epipsychidion the foolish child, her husband, assigned her the part of moon to Emilia Viviani's sun,

and lamented that he was barred from final, certain, irreversible happiness by a cold and callous society. Yet

few poets were so mated before, and no poet was so mated afterwards, until Browning stooped and picked up

In truth, his very unhappiness and discontent with life, in so far as it was not the inevitable penalty of the

ethical anarch, can only be ascribed to this same childlike irrationalitythough in such a form it is

irrationality hardly peculiar to Shelley. Pity, if you will, his spiritual ruins and the neglected early training

which was largely their cause; but the pity due to his outward circumstances has been strangely exaggerated.

The obloquy from which he suffered he deliberately and wantonly courted. For the rest, his lot was one that

many a young poet might envy. He had faithful friends, a faithful wife, an income small but assured. Poverty

never dictated to his pen; the designs on his bright imagination were never etched by the sharp fumes of

If, as has chanced to othersas chanced, for example, to Mangan outcast from home, health and hope,

with a charred past and a bleared future, an anchorite without detachment and selfcloistered without

selfsufficingness, deposed from a world which he had not abdicated, pierced with thorns which formed no

crown, a poet hopeless of the bays and a martyr hopeless of the palm, a land cursed against the dews of love,

an exile banned and proscribed even from the innocent arms of childhoodhe were burning helpless at the

stake of his unquenchable heart, then he might have been inconsolable, then might he have cast the gorge at

life, then have cowered in the darkening chamber of his being, tapestried with mouldering hopes, and

hearkened to the winds that swept across the illimitable wastes of death. But no such hapless lot was Shelley's

as that of his own contemporariesKeats, half chewed in the jaws of London and spit dying on to Italy; de

Quincey, who, if he escaped, escaped rent and maimed from those cruel jaws; Coleridge, whom they dully

mumbled for the major portion of his life. Shelley had competence, poetry, love; yet he wailed that he could

lie down like a tired child and weep away his life of care. Is it ever so with you, sad brother; is it ever so with

me? and is there no drinking of pearls except they be dissolved in biting tears? "Which of us has his desire, or

It is true that he shared the fate of nearly all the great poets contemporary with him, in being unappreciated.

Like them, he suffered from critics who were for ever shearing the wild tresses of poetry between rusty rules,

who could never see a literary bough project beyond the trim level of its day but they must lop it with a

crooked criticism, who kept indomitably planting in the defile of fame the "established canons" that had been

spiked by poet after poet. But we decline to believe that a singer of Shelley's calibre could be seriously

grieved by want of vogue. Not that we suppose him to have found consolation in that senseless superstition,

"the applause of posterity." Posterity! posterity which goes to Rome, weeps largesized tears, carves

beautiful inscriptions over the tomb of Keats; and the worm must wriggle her curtsey to it all, since the dead

boy, wherever he be, has quite other gear to tend. Never a bone less dry for all the tears!

A poet must to some extent be a chameleon and feed on air. But it need not be the musty breath of the

multitude. He can find his needful support in the judgement of those whose judgement he knows valuable,

Yet if this might be needful to him as support, neither this, nor the applause of the present, nor the applause

of posterity, could have been needful to him as motive: the one allsufficing motive for a great poet's singing

Precisely so. The overcharged breast can find no ease but in suckling the babysong. No enmity of outward

circumstances, therefore, but his own nature, was responsible for Shelley's doom.

A being with so much about it of childlike unreasonableness, and yet withal so much of the beautiful

attraction luminous in a child's sweet unreasonableness, would seem forefated by its very essence to the

transience of the bubble and the rainbow, of all things filmy and fair. Did some shadow of this destiny bear

part in his sadness? Certain it is that, by a curious chance, he himself in Julian and Maddalo jestingly foretold

the manner of his end. "O ho! You talk as in years past," said Maddalo (Byron) to Julian (Shelley); "If you

can't swim, Beware of Providence." Did no unearthly dixisti sound in his ears as he wrote it? But a brief

while, and Shelley, who could not swim, was weltering on the waters of Lerici. We know not how this may

affect others, but over us it is a coincidence which has long tyrannised with an absorbing inveteracy of

impression (strengthened rather than diminished by the contrast between the levity of the utterance and its

fatal fulfilment)thus to behold, heralding itself in warning mockery through the very lips of its predestined

victim, the Doom upon whose breath his locks were lifting along the coasts of Campania. The death which he

had prophesied came upon him, and Spezzia enrolled another name among the mournful Marcelli of our

tongue; Venetian glasses which foamed and burst before the poisoned wine of life had risen to their brims.

Coming to Shelley's poetry, we peep over the wild mask of revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the

winsome face of the child. Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than The Cloud,

and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs from the faculty of makebelieve. The same thing is

conspicuous, though less purely conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the child's faculty of makebelieve

raised to the nth power. He is still at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his

playthings are those which the gods give their children. The universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his

fingers in the dayfall. He is golddusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief with the

moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand. He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs

at the shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered with his

broken fancies. He runs wild over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets between the feet of

the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred

This it was which, in spite of his essentially modern character as a singer, qualified Shelley to be the poet of

Prometheus Unbound, for it made him, in the truest sense of the word, a mythological poet. This childlike

quality assimilated him to the childlike peoples among whom mythologies have their rise. Those Nature

myths which, according to many, are the basis of all mythology, are likewise the very basis of Shelley's

poetry. The lark that is the gossip of heaven, the winds that pluck the grey from the beards of the billows, the

clouds that are snorted from the sea's broad nostril, all the elemental spirits of Nature, take from his verse

perpetual incarnation and reincarnation, pass in a thousand glorious transmigrations through the radiant forms

Thus, but not in the Wordsworthian sense, he is a veritable poet of Nature. For with Nature the

Wordsworthians will admit no tampering: they exact the direct interpretative reproduction of her; that the

poet should follow her as a mistress, not use her as a handmaid. To such following of Nature, Shelley felt no

call. He saw in her not a picture set for his copying, but a palette set for his brush; not a habitation prepared

for his inhabiting, but a Coliseum whence he might quarry stones for his own palaces. Even in his descriptive

passages the dreamcharacter of his scenery is notorious; it is not the clear, recognisable scenery of

Wordsworth, but a landscape that hovers athwart the heat and haze arising from his crackling fantasies. The

materials for such visionary Edens have evidently been accumulated from direct experience, but they are

recomposed by him into such scenes as never had mortal eye beheld. "Don't you wish you had?" as Turner

said. The one justification for classing Shelley with the Lake poet is that he loved Nature with a love even

more passionate, though perhaps less profound. Wordsworth's Nightingale and Stockdove sums up the

contrast between the two, as though it had been written for such a purpose. Shelley is the "creature of

But if Shelley, instead of culling Nature, crossed with its pollen the blossoms of his own soul, that

Babylonian garden is his marvellous and best apology. For astounding figurative opulence he yields only to

Shakespeare, and even to Shakespeare not in absolute fecundity but in images. The sources of his figurative

wealth are specialised, sources of Shakespeare's are universal. It would have been as conscious an effort for

him to speak without figure as it is for most men to speak with figure. Suspended in the dripping well of his

imagination the commonest object becomes encrusted with imagery. Herein again he deviates from the true

Nature poet, the normal Wordsworth type of Nature poet: imagery was to him not a mere means of

expression, not even a mere means of adornment; it was a delight for its own sake.

And herein we find the trail by which we would classify him. He belongs to a school of which not impossibly

he may hardly have read a linethe Metaphysical School. To a large extent he IS what the Metaphysical

School should have been. That school was a certain kind of poetry trying for a range. Shelley is the range

found. Crashaw and Shelley sprang from the same seed; but in the one case the seed was choked with thorns,

in the other case it fell on good ground. The Metaphysical School was in its direct results an abortive

movement, though indirectly much came of itfor Dryden came of it. Dryden, to a greater extent than is (we

imagine) generally perceived, was Cowley systematised; and Cowley, who sank into the arms of Dryden,

But the movement was so abortive that few will thank us for connecting with it the name of Shelley. This is

because to most people the Metaphysical School means Donne, whereas it ought to mean Crashaw. We judge

the direction of a development by its highest form, though that form may have been produced but once, and

produced imperfectly. Now the highest product of the Metaphysical School was Crashaw, and Crashaw was a

Shelley manque; he never reached the Promised Land, but he had fervid visions of it. The Metaphysical

School, like Shelley, loved imagery for its own sake: and how beautiful a thing the frank toying with imagery

may be, let The Skylark and The Cloud witness. It is only evil when the poet, on the straight way to a fixed

object, lags continually from the path to play. This is commendable neither in poet nor errandboy. The

Metaphysical School failed, not because it toyed with imagery, but because it toyed with it frostily. To sport

with the tangles of Neaera's hair may be trivial idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly as your relation to

Neaera is that of heartless gallantry or of love. So you may toy with imagery in mere intellectual ingenuity,

and then you might as well go write acrostics: or you may toy with it in raptures, and then you may write a

Sensitive Plant. In fact, the Metaphysical poets when they went astray cannot be said to have done anything

so dainty as is implied by TOYING with imagery. They cut it into shapes with a pair of scissors. From all

such danger Shelley was saved by his passionate spontaneity. No trappings are too splendid for the swift

steeds of sunrise. His swordhilt may be rough with jewels, but it is the hilt of an Excalibur. His thoughts

scorch through all the folds of expression. His cloth of gold bursts at the flexures, and shows the naked

It is this gift of not merely embodying but apprehending everything in figure which cooperates towards

creating his rarest characteristics, so almost preternaturally developed in no other poet, namely, his

wellknown power to condense the most hydrogenic abstraction. Science can now educe threads of such

exquisite tenuity that only the feet of the tiniest infantspiders can ascend them; but up the filmiest

insubstantiality Shelley runs with agile ease. To him, in truth, nothing is abstract. The dustiest abstractions

The coldest moon of an idea rises haloed through his vaporous imagination. The dimmestsparked chip of a

conception blazes and scintillates in the subtile oxygen of his mind. The most wrinkled AEson of an

abstruseness leaps rosy out of his bubbling genius. In a more intensified signification than it is probable that

Shakespeare dreamed of, Shelley gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Here afresh he touches

the Metaphysical School, whose very title was drawn from this habitual pursuit of abstractions, and who

failed in that pursuit from the one cause omnipresent with them, because in all their poetic smithy they had

left never a place for a forge. They laid their fancies chill on the anvil. Crashaw, indeed, partially anticipated

Shelley's success, and yet further did a later poet, so much further that we find it difficult to understand why a

generation that worships Shelley should be reviving Gray, yet almost forget the name of Collins. The

generality of readers, when they know him at all, usually know him by his Ode on the Passions. In this,

despite its beauty, there is still a soupcon of formalism, a lingering trace of powder from the eighteenth

century periwig, dimming the bright locks of poetry. Only the literary student reads that little masterpiece, the

Ode to Evening, which sometimes heralds the Shelleian strain, while other passages are the sole things in the

language comparable to the miniatures of Il Penseroso. Crashaw, Collins, Shelleythree ricochets of the one

pebble, three jets from three bounds of the one Pegasus! Collins's Pity, "with eyes of dewy light," is near of

kin to Shelley's Sleep, "the filmyeyed"; and the "shadowy tribes of mind" are the lineal progenitors of

"Thought's crowned powers." This, however, is personification, wherein both Collins and Shelley build on

Spenser: the dizzying achievement to which the modern poet carried personification accounts for but a

moiety, if a large moiety, of his vivifying power over abstractions. Take the passage (already alluded to) in

Any partial explanation will break in our hands before it reaches the root of such a power. The root, we take

it, is this. He had an instinctive perception (immense in range and fertility, astonishing for its delicate

intuition) of the underlying analogies the secret subterranean passages, between matter and soul; the

chromatic scales, whereat we dimly guess, by which the Almighty modulates through all the keys of creation.

Because, the more we consider it, the more likely does it appear that Nature is but an imperfect actress,

whose constant changes of dress never change her manner and method, who is the same in all her parts.

To Shelley's ethereal vision the most rarified mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding

forms on the sand of outward things. He stood thus at the very junctionlines of the visible and invisible, and

could shift the points as he willed. His thoughts became a mounted infantry, passing with baffling swiftness

from horse to foot or foot to horse. He could express as he listed the material and the immaterial in terms of

each other. Never has a poet in the past rivalled him as regards this gift, and hardly will any poet rival him as

regards it in the future: men are like first to see the promised doom lay its hand on the tree of heaven and

The finest specimens of this faculty are probably to be sought in that Shelleian treasury, Prometheus

Unbound. It is unquestionably the greatest and most prodigal exhibition of Shelley's powers, this amazing

lyric world, where immortal clarities sigh past in the perfumes of the blossoms, populate the breathings of the

breeze, throng and twinkle in the leaves that twirl upon the bough; where the very grass is all arustle with

lovely spiritthings, and a weeping mist of music fills the air. The final scenes especially are such a Bacchic

reel and rout and revelry of beauty as leaves one staggered and giddy; poetry is spilt like wine, music runs to

drunken waste. The choruses sweep down the wind, tirelessly, flight after flight, till the breathless soul almost

cries for respite from the unrolling splendours. Yet these scenes, so wonderful from a purely poetical

standpoint that no one could wish them away, are (to our humble thinking) nevertheless the artistic error of

the poem. Abstractedly, the development of Shelley's idea required that he should show the earthly paradise

which was to follow the fall of Zeus. But dramatically with that fall the action ceases, and the drama should

have ceased with it. A final chorus, or choral series, of rejoicings (such as does ultimately end the drama

where Prometheus appears on the scene) would have been legitimate enough. Instead, however, the

bewildered reader finds the drama unfolding itself through scene after scene which leaves the action precisely

where it found it, because there is no longer an action to advance. It is as if the choral finale of an opera were

We have, nevertheless, called Prometheus Shelley's greatest poem because it is the most comprehensive

storehouse of his power. Were we asked to name the most PERFECT among his longer efforts, we should

name the poem in which he lamented Keats: under the shed petals of his lovely fancy giving the slain bird a

silken burial. Seldom is the death of a poet mourned in true poetry. Not often is the singer coffined in

laurelwood. Among the very few exceptions to such a rule, the greatest is Adonais. In the English language

only Lycidas competes with it; and when we prefer Adonais to Lycidas, we are following the precedent set in

the case of Cicero: Adonais is the longer. As regards command over abstraction, it is no less characteristically

Shelleian than Prometheus. It is throughout a series of abstractions vitalised with daring exquisiteness, from

In the solar spectrum, beyond the extreme red and extreme violet rays, are whole series of colours,

demonstrable, but imperceptible to gross human vision. Such writing as this we have quoted renders visible

One thing prevents Adonais from being ideally perfect: its lack of Christian hope. Yet we remember well the

writer of a popular memoir on Keats proposing as "the best consolation for the mind pained by this sad

What desolation can it be that discerns comfort in this hope, whose wan countenance is as the countenance of

a despair? What deepest depth of agony is it that finds consolation in this immortality: an immortality which

thrusts you into death, the maw of Nature, that your dissolved elements may circulate through her veins?

Yet such, the poet tells me, is my sole balm for the hurts of life. I am as the vocal breath floating from an

organ. I too shall fade on the winds, a cadence soon forgotten. So I dissolve and die, and am lost in the ears of

men: the particles of my being twine in newer melodies, and from my one death arise a hundred lives. Why,

through the thin partition of this consolation Pantheism can hear the groans of its neighbour, Pessimism.

Better almost the black resignation which the fatalist draws from his own hopelessness, from the fierce kisses

With some gleams, it is true, of more than mock solace, Adonais is lighted; but they are obtained by

implicitly assuming the personal immortality which the poem explicitly denies; as when, for instance, to greet

After all, to finish where we began, perhaps the poems on which the lover of Shelley leans most lovingly,

which he has oftenest in his mind, which best represent Shelley to him and which he instinctively reverts to

when Shelley's name is mentioned are some of the shorter poems and detached lyrics. Here Shelley forgets

for a while all that ever makes his verse turbid; forgets that he is anything but a poet, forgets sometimes that

he is anything but a child; lies back in his skiff, and looks at the clouds. He plays truant from earth, slips

through the wicket of fancy into heaven's meadow, and goes gathering stars. Here we have that absolute

virgingold of song which is the scarcest among human products, and for which we can go to but three

poetsColeridge, Shelley, Chopin, {8} and perhaps we should add Keats. Christabel and KublaKhan; The

Skylark, The Cloud, and The Sensitive Plant (in its first two parts). The Eve of Saint Agnes and The

Nightingale; certain of the Nocturnes;these things make very quintessentialised loveliness. It is attar of

Remark, as a thing worth remarking, that, although Shelley's diction is at other times singularly rich, it ceases

in these poems to be rich, or to obtrude itself at all; it is imperceptible; his Muse has become a veritable Echo,

whose body has dissolved from about her voice. Indeed, when his diction is richest, nevertheless the poetry

so dominates the expression that we feel the latter only as an atmosphere until we are satiated with the

former; then we discover with surprise to how imperial a vesture we had been blinded by gazing on the face

of his song. A lesson, this, deserving to be conned by a generation so opposite in tendency as our own: a

lesson that in poetry, as in the Kingdom of God, we should not take thought too greatly wherewith we shall

be clothed, but seek first {9} the spirit, and all these things will be added unto us.

On the marvellous music of Shelley's verse we need not dwell, except to note that he avoids that metronomic

beat of rhythm which Edgar Poe introduced into modern lyric measures, as Pope introduced it into the

rhyming heroics of his day. Our varied metres are becoming as painfully overpolished as Pope's one metre.

Shelley could at need sacrifice smoothness to fitness. He could write an anapaest that would send Mr.

Swinburne into strong shudders (e.g., "stream did glide") when he instinctively felt that by so forgoing the

more obvious music of melody he would better secure the higher music of harmony. If we have to add that in

other ways he was far from escaping the defects of his merits, and would sometimes have to acknowledge

that his Nilotic flood too often overflowed its banks, what is this but saying that he died young?

It may be thought that in our casual comments on Shelley's life we have been blind to its evil side. That,

however, is not the case. We see clearly that he committed grave sins, and one cruel crime; but we remember

also that he was an Atheist from his boyhood; we reflect how gross must have been the moral neglect in the

training of a child who COULD be an Atheist from his boyhood: and we decline to judge so unhappy a being

by the rules which we should apply to a Catholic. It seems to us that Shelley was strugglingblindly,

weakly, stumblingly, but still strugglingtowards higher things. His Pantheism is an indication of it.

Pantheism is a halfway house, and marks ascent or descent according to the direction from which it is

approached. Now Shelley came to it from absolute Atheism; therefore in his case it meant rise. Again, his

poetry alone would lead us to the same conclusion, for we do not believe that a truly corrupted spirit can

write consistently ethereal poetry. We should believe in nothing, if we believed that, for it would be the

consecration of a lie. Poetry is a thermometer: by taking its average height you can estimate the normal

temperature of its writer's mind. The devil can do many things. But the devil cannot write poetry. He may

mar a poet, but he cannot make a poet. Among all the temptations wherewith he tempted St. Anthony, though

we have often seen it stated that he howled, we have never seen it stated that he sang.

Shelley's anarchic principles were as a rule held by him with some misdirected view to truth. He disbelieved

in kings. And is it not a mere factregret it if you willthat in all European countries, except two,

monarchs are a mere survival, the obsolete buttons on the coattails of rule, which serve no purpose but to be

continually coming off? It is a miserable thing to note how every little Balkan State, having obtained liberty

(save the mark!) by Act of Congress, straightway proceeds to secure the service of a professional king. These

gentlemen are plentiful in Europe. They are the "noble Chairmen" who lend their names for a consideration

to any enterprising company which may be speculating in Liberty. When we see these things, we revert to the

old lines in which Persius tells how you cannot turn Dama into a freeman by twirling him round your finger

Again, Shelley desired a religion of humanity, and that meant, to him, a religion for humanity, a religion

which, unlike the spectral Christianity about him, should permeate and regulate the whole organisation of

men. And the feeling is one with which a Catholic must sympathise, in an age whenif we may say so

without irreverencethe Almighty has been made a constitutional Deity, with certain stategrants of

worship, but no influence over political affairs. In these matters his aims were generous, if his methods were

perniciously mistaken. In his theory of Free Love alone, borrowed like the rest from the Revolution, his aim

was as mischievous as his method. At the same time he was at least logical. His theory was repulsive, but

comprehensible. Whereas from our present via mediafacilitation of divorcecan only result the era when

the young lady in reduced circumstances will no longer turn governess but will be open to engagement as

We spoke of the purity of Shelley's poetry. We know of but three passages to which exception can be taken.

One is happily hidden under a heap of Shelleian rubbish. Another is offensive, because it presents his theory

of Free Love in its most odious form. The third is very much a matter, we think, for the individual

conscience. Compare with this the genuinely corrupt Byron, through the cracks and fissures of whose heaving

versification steam up perpetually the sulphurous vapours from his central iniquity. We cannot credit that any

Christian ever had his faith shaken through reading Shelley, unless his faith were shaken before he read

Shelley. Is any safely havened bark likely to slip its cable, and make for a flag planted on the very reef where

Why indeed (one is tempted to ask in concluding) should it be that the poets who have written for us the

poetry richest in skiey grain, most free from admixture with the duller things of earththe Shelleys, the

Coleridges, the Keatsare the very poets whose lives are among the saddest records in literature? Is it that

(by some subtile mystery of analogy) sorrow, passion, and fantasy are indissolubly connected, like water,

fire, and cloud; that as from sun and dew are born the vapours, so from fire and tears ascend the "visions of

aerial joy"; that the harvest waves richest over the battlefields of the soul; that the heart, like the earth, smells

sweetest after rain; that the spell on which depend such necromantic castles is some spirit of pain

charmpoisoned at their base? {10} Such a poet, it may be, mists with sighs the window of his life until the

tears run down it; then some air of searching poetry, like an air of searching frost, turns it to a crystal wonder.

The god of golden song is the god, too, of the golden sun; so peradventure songlight is like sunlight, and

darkens the countenance of the soul. Perhaps the rays are to the stars what thorns are to the flowers; and so

the poet, after wandering over heaven, returns with bleeding feet. Less tragic in its merely temporal aspect

than the life of Keats or Coleridge, the life of Shelley in its moral aspect is, perhaps, more tragical than that of

either; his dying seems a myth, a figure of his living; the material shipwreck a figure of the immaterial.

Enchanted child, born into a world unchildlike; spoiled darling of Nature, playmate of her elemental

daughters; "pardlike spirit, beautiful and swift," laired amidst the burning fastnesses of his own fervid mind;

bold foot along the verges of precipitous dream; light leaper from crag to crag of inaccessible fancies;

towering Genius, whose soul rose like a ladder between heaven and earth with the angels of song ascending

and descending it;he is shrunken into the little vessel of death, and sealed with the unshatterable seal of

doom, and cast down deep below the rolling tides of Time. Mighty meat for little guests, when the heart of

Shelley was laid in the cemetery of Caius Cestius! Beauty, music, sweetness, tearsthe mouth of the worm

has fed of them all. Into that sacred bridal gloom of death where he holds his nuptials with eternity let not

our rash speculations follow him. Let us hope rather that as, amidst material nature, where our dull eyes see

only ruin, the finer eye of science has discovered life in putridity and vigour in decay, seeing dissolution

even and disintegration, which in the mouth of man symbolise disorder, to be in the works of God

undeviating order, and the manner of our corruption to be no less wonderful than the manner of our

health,so, amidst the supernatural universe, some tender undreamed surprise of life in doom awaited that

wild nature, which, worn by warfare with itself, its Maker, and all the world, now

{2} The Abbe Bareille was not, of course, responsible for Savonarola's taste, only for thus endorsing it.

{4} We are a little surprised at the fact, because so many Victorian poets are, or have been, prosewriters as

well. Now, according to our theory, the practice of prose should maintain fresh and comprehensive a poet's

diction, should save him from falling into the hands of an exclusive coterie of poetic words. It should react

upon his metrical vocabulary to its beneficial expansion, by taking him outside his aristocratic circle of

language, and keeping him in touch with the great commonalty, the proletariat of speech. For it is with words

as with men: constant intermarriage within the limits of a patrician clan begets effete refinement; and to

reinvigorate the stock, its veins must be replenished from hardy plebeian blood.

{5} Wordsworth's adaptation of it, however, is true. Men are not "children of a larger growth," but the child

IS father of the man, since the parent is only partially reproduced in his offspring.

{7} "And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is

{8} Such analogies between master in sisterarts are often interesting. In some respects, is not Brahms the

{10} We hope that we need not refer the reader, for the methods of magic architecture, to Ariosto and that