to translate his dreams into acts. The practical side of him was so strong that he might have been a great statesman or reformer, had not his imagination, stimulated by a torrential fluency

0 a novel, written for the most part when he was seventeen years old, called 'Zastrozzi', the mere title of which, with its romantic profusion of sibilants, is eloquent of its nature. This was soon followed by another like it, 'St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian'. Whether they are adaptations from the German (2) or not, these books are merely bad imitations of the bad school then in vogue, the flesh-creeping school of skeletons and clanking chains, of convulsions and ecstasies, which Miss Austen, though no one knew it, had killed with laughter years before. (3) "Verezzi scarcely now shuddered when the slimy lizard crossed his naked and motionless limbs. The large ear

man suggests in the

s Prose Works. But

arning Germa

y', satirising Mrs.

1798, but was not p

o destroy bigotry, intolerance, and persecution as represented by religious and monarchical institutions. At first this influence combined with his misguided literary passions only to heighten the whole absurdity, as when he exclaims, in a letter about his first disappointed love, "I swear, and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity, blast me-never will I forgive Intolerance!" The character of

vils, but to promote some practical scheme for abolishing them. Let a national referendum, he says, be held on the question of reform, and let it be agreed that the result shall be binding on Parliament; he himself will contribute 100 pounds a year (one-tenth of his income) to the expenses of organisation. He is in favour of annual Parliaments. Though a believer in universal suffrage, he prefers to advance by degrees; it would not do to abolis

is no reason for believing in Christianity. This was easy enough, and a number of impatient argumentative pamphlets were dashed off. One of these, 'The Necessity of Atheism', caused, as we saw, a revolution in his life. But, while Christian dogma was the heart of the enemy's position, there were out-works which might also be usefully attacked:-there were alcohol and meat, the causes of all disease and devastating passion; there were despotism and plutocracy, based on commercial greed; and there was marriage, which irrationally tyrannising over sexual relations, produces unnatural celibacy and pr

eeled in silen

ep with looks of

right bea

h the casem

s explicit. These notes are a queer medley. We may laugh at their crudity-their certainty that, once orthodoxy has been destroyed by argument, the millennium will begin; what is more to the purpose is to recognise that here is something more than the ordinary dogmatism of youthful ignorance. There is a flow of vigorous language, vividness of imagination, and, above all, much conscientious reasoning and a passion for hard facts. His wife was not far wrong when she praised him for a "logical exactness of reason." The arguments he uses are, indeed, all second-hand, and mostly fallacious; but he knew instinctively something which is for ever hidden from the mass of mankind-the difference between an argument

ing further to underline the connection, which persists all through his work and is alread

xactly his own experiences in dreaming. The result showed that, along with the scientific impulse, there was working in him a more powerful antagonistic force. He got no further than telling how once, when walking with Hogg near Oxford, he suddenly turned the corner of a lane, and a scene presented itself which, though commonplace, was yet mysteriously connected with the obscurer parts of his nature. A windmill stood in a plashy meadow; behind it was a long low hill, and "a grey covering of uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It was the season of the year when the last leaf had just fallen from the scant and stunted ash." The manuscript concludes: "I suddenly remembered to have seen that exact scene in some dream of long-Here I was obliged to leave off, overcome with thrilling horror." And, apart from such overwhelming surges of emotion f

ind; and that is the view which he found, or thought that he found, in the dialogues of Plato, and which gave to his whole being a bent it was never to lose. He liked to call himself an atheist; and, if pantheism is atheism, an atheist no doubt he was. But, whatever the correct label, he was eminently religious. In the notes to 'Queen Mab' he announces his belief in "a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe," and religion meant for him a "perception of the relation in which we stand to the principle of the universe"-a perception which, in his case, was accompanied by intense emotion. Having thus grasped the notion that the whole universe is one spirit, he absorbed from Plato a theory which accorded perfectly with his predisposition-the theory that all the good and beautiful things that we love on earth are partial manifestations of an absolute beauty o

round him by the progress of reason, the thicker is the darkness of antiquated barbarism in which he buries himself like a mole, to throw up the barren hillocks of his Cimmerian labours." These gay shafts had at any rate the merit of stinging Shelley to action. 'The Defence of Poetry' was his reply. People like Peacock treat poetry, and art generally, as an adventitious seasoning of life-ornamental perhaps, but rather out of place in a progressive and practical age. Shelley undermines the whole position by asserting that poetry-a name which includes for him all serious art-is the very stuff out of which all that is valuable and real in life is made. "A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth." "The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful that exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination." And it is on the imagination that poetry works, strengthening it as exercises strengthen a limb. Historically

besides Shel

ll that ea

ts of everl

be imagined that he was a didactic poet. It was the theory of the eighteenth century, and for a brief period, when the first impulse of the Romantic Movement was spent, it was again to become the theory of the nineteenth century, that the object of poetry is to inculcate correct principles of morals and religion. Poetry, with its power of pleasing, was the jam which should make us swallow the powde

ctical politics and speculative philosophy a deeper force was working. Yet it is characteristic of him that he always tended to regard the writing of verse as a 'pis aller'. In 1819, when he was actually working on 'Prometheus', he wrote to Peacock, "I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science," add

to shadow forth the emotional history of a young and beautiful poet. As a child he dr

youth had

eside and al

truths in undi

ie, and Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste," and, arrived at the vale of Cashmire, lies down to sleep in a dell. Here he has a vision. A "veiled maid" sits by him, and, aft

f Sweet Human

he sleep of h

oicest

he pauses "on the lone Chorasmian shore," and sees a frail shallop in which he trusts himself to the waves. Day and night the boat flies before the storm to the base of the cliffs of Caucasus, where it is engulfed in a cavern. F

e gentle, and

ace and genius!

id i' the world

en live on... bu

Greek word meaning

ng Spi

ied novel with a more or less coherent plot, though the mechanism is cumbrous, and any one who expects from the title a story of some actual rebellion against the Turks will be disappointed. Its theme, typified by an introductory vision of an eagle and serpent bat

hearts a host o

meet-the world's f

rine (the long last line which should exceed the rest by a foot) left in the middle of a stanza, whereas in fact there are some eight places where obviously redundant syllables have crept in. A more serious defect is the persistence, still unassimilated, of the element of the romantic-horrible. When Laon, chained to the top of a column, gnaws corpses, we feel that the author of Zastrozzi is still slightly ridiculous, magnificent though his writing has become. It is hard, again, not to smile at this world in which the melodious voices of young eleutherarchs have only to sound for the crouching slave to recover his manhood and for tyrants to tremble and turn pale. The poet knows, as he wrote in answer to a criticism, that his mission is "to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling," and "to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole." He does not see that he has failed of both aims, partly because 'The Revolt' is too abstract, partly because it is too definite. It is neither one thing nor the other. The feelings apprehended are, indeed, remote enough; in many descriptions where land, sea, and mountain shimmer through a gorgeous mist that never was of this earth, the "material universe" may perhaps be admitted to be grasped as a whole; and he has emb

hope and the Spirit of triumph, emanating from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good." In the Greek play, Zeus is an usurper in heaven who has supplanted an older and milder dynasty of gods, and Prometheus, visited in his punishment by the nymphs of ocean, knows a secret on which the rule of Zeus depends. Shelley took over these features, and grafted on them his own peculiar confidence in the ultimate perfection of mankind. His Prometheus knows that Jupiter (the Evil Principle) will some day be overthrow

aciers pierce me

eezing crystals,

burning cold

up spirits to soothe him with images of delight; but he declares "most vain all hope but love," and thinks of Asia, his wife in happier days. The second act is full of the dreams of Asia. With Panthea, one of the ocean nymphs that watch over Prometheus, she makes her way to

ife! thy l

ve the breath

ves; Demogorgon descends from it, and hurls him to the abyss. Prometheus, set free

ark has fallen,

ree, uncircums

ed, tribeless,

e, worship, de

f; just, ge

ough the realms of sky; while his fair and weaker companion and attendant, the Spirit of the Moon, receives bliss from the annihilation of evil in the superior sphere." We are in a strange metaphysical region, an interstellar

s which Hope t

gs darker than

r which seem

ear; to hope t

eck the thing i

nge, nor falte

hy glory, Ti

d joyous, beau

ife, Joy, Empir

nts of the period of revolution through which southern Europe was then passing, so that it differs from the Prometheus in having historical facts as ostensible subject. Through it reverberates the dissolution of kingdoms in feats of arms by land and sea from Persia to Morocco, and these cataclysms, though suggestive of something that transcends any human warfare, are yet not completely pinnacled in "the intense inane." But this is not the only merit of "Hellas;' its poetry is purer than that of the earlier work, because Shelley no longer takes sides so violently. He has lost the cruder optimism of the 'Prometheus', and is thrown back for consolation upon something that moves us more than any prospect of a heaven realised on earth by a

u? Thy words stre

mist withi

ntil it drowns even the cries of victory when the tide of battle turns in favour of the Turks. The chorus, lamenting antiphonally the destruction of liberty, are interrupted by repeated howls of savag

s great age

en years

oth like a

er weeds

and faiths an

of a disso

ven place to a poignant

ust hate and

st men ki

not to its

ter pr

is weary o

t die or re

be restored; but the wisdom of its thinkers and the creatio

sion;-all th

sick eye, bubbl

to Swinburne, have more or less come to grief. Its subject is the fate of Beatrice Cenci, the daughter of a noble Roman house, who in 1599 was executed with her stepmother and brother for the murder of her father. The wicked father, more intensely wicked for his grey hairs and his immense ability, whose wealth had purchased from the Pope impunity for a long succession of crimes, hated his children, and drove them to frenzy by his relentless cruelty. When to insults and oppression he added the horrors of an incestuous passion for his daughter, the cup overflowed, and Beatrice, faced with shame more intolerable than death, preferred parricide. Here was a subject made to Shelley's hand-a naturally pure and gentle soul soiled, driven to violence, and finally extinguished, by unnameable wrong, while all authority, both h

ived in a cave on Mount Atlas, and her games in a magic boat, her dances in the upper regions of space, and the pranks which she played among men, are described in verse of a richness that bewilders because it leads to nothing. The poet juggles with flowers and gems, stars and spirits, lovers and meteors; we are constantly expecting him to break into some design, and are as constantly disappointed. Our bewilderment is of a peculiar kind; it is not the same, for instance, as that produced by Blake's prophetic books, where we are conscious of a great spirit fumbling after the in

ted entirely to art, and was uneventful, its only incidents an unhappy love-affair, and the growth, hastened by disappointed passion and the 'Quarterly Review's' contemptuous attack on his work, of the consumption which killed him at the age of twenty-six. He was sent to Italy as a last chance. Shelley, who was then at Pisa, proposed to nurse him back to health, and offered him shelter. Keats refused the invitation, and died at Rome on February 23, 1821. Shelley was not intimate with Keats, and h

and Ado

sions, and ve

looms, and glimm

ears, and twil

proceeds he warms to his work. The poets gather round Adonais' bier, and in

Nature's nak

; and now he

ps o'er the wor

oughts along t

g hounds, their fat

Shelley has found his cue. The strain rises from tho

e is not dead, h

ned from the

lost in stormy

s an unprofi

ith Nature"; he is a

e world with nev

beneath, and ki

trong is the sense of his own misery, the premonition of his own death, that we scarcely know, nor does it matter, whether it is in the person of Keats or of

ore, far from th

e never to the

ter he wa

i," to whom 'Epipsychidion' is addressed. Shelley begins by exhausting, in the effort to express her perfection, all the metaphors that rapture can suggest. He calls her his adored nightingale, a spirit-winged heart, a seraph of heaven, sweet benediction in the eternal curse, moon beyond the clouds, star above the storm, "thou Wonder and thou Beauty and thou Terror! Thou Harmony of Nature's

philosophy,

common hell, o

as a fiery

intry forest of life, where "one whose voice was venomed melody" entraps and poisons his youth. The ideal is sought in vain in many mortal shapes, until the moon rises on him, "the cold chaste Moon," smiling on his soul, which lies in a death-like trance, a frozen ocean. At last the long-sought vision comes into the wintry forest; it is Emily, like the sun, bringing light and odour and new life. Henceforth he is a world ruled by and rejoicing in these twin spheres. "As to real flesh and blood," he said in a letter to Leigh Hunt, "you know that I do not deal in those articles; you might as well

e i

s on which my s

hts of love's

ead around its

nk, I trembl

nothing else his fame would still be secure. They are, however, less than half of the verse that he actually wrote. Besides many completed poems, it remained for his wife to decipher, from