and in reposeful enjoyment of the lofty skies and purple fields, the broad visions of beauty, the romantic witchery of this land of poetry, his genius found its best and truest inspiration. Here he had just begun to show with what sustained ease and consummate art he could rise to the loftiest reaches of inspired song, when his voice was suddenly silenced. His last residence was the Casa Magni, on the Bay of Spezia, where he indulged much in his favorite sport of boating. On the afternoon of July 8, 1822, while returning from a visit of welcome to Leigh Hunt at Leghorn, his frail yacht was capsized in a gale and all on board perished. Shelley's body was washed ashore a few days later and, in accordance with the quarantine regulations, was burned by his friends Byron, Trelawney, and Leigh Hunt, and the ashes deposited in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, near the grave of Keats -that spot he had just described so beautifully in "Adonais." In view of the achievement of the life thus brought to an untimely end, it may well be called "a miracle of thirty years." 66 Shelley is "the most poetical of poets since the days of Elizabeth,” says Stopford Brooke. Of his proper rank, the poet Swinburne ventures the opinion that of all forms or kinds of poetry the two highest are the lyric and the dramatic, and that as clearly as the first place in the one rank is held among us by Shakespeare, the first place in the other is held and will never be resigned by Shelley." Says J. Addington Symonds: "In none of Shelley's greatest contemporaries was the lyrical faculty so paramount; and 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 he was also 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." Professor Shairp, who estimates the poet's character and genius with true Scotch conservatism, says of the lyrics: "Single thrills of rapture, which are insufficient to make long poems out of, supply the very inspiration for the true lyric. It is this predominance of emotion, so unhappy to himself, which made Shelley the lyrist that he was. When he sings his lyric strains, whatever is least pleasing in him is softened down, if it does not wholly disappear. Whatever is most unique and excellent in INTRODUCTION. him comes out at its best-his eye for abstract beauty, the subtlety of his thought, the rush of his eager pursuing desire, the splendor of his imagery, the delicate rhythm, the matchless music. These lyrics are gales of melody blown from a far-off region, that looks fair in the distance. To enjoy them it may perhaps be as well not to inquire too closely what is the nature of that land, or to know too exactly the theories and views of life of which these songs are the effluence." The critic and the poet's biographer, W. M. Rossetti, thus summarizes his work: "He excels all his competitors in ideality, he excels them in mnusic, and he excels them in importance. By importance we here mean the direct import of the work performed, its controlling power over the reader's thought and feeling, the contagious fire of its white-hot intellectual passion, and the long reverberation of its appeal. We have named ideality as one of his leading excellencies. This Shelleian quality combines, as its constituents, sublimity, beauty, and the abstract passion for good. It should be acknowledged that, while this great quality forms the chief and most admirable factor in Shelley's poetry, the defects that go along with it mar his work too often-producing at times vagueness, unreliability, and a pomp of glittering indistinctness, in which excess of sentiment welters amid excess of words. The blemish affects the long poems much more than the pure lyrics; in the latter the rapture, the music, and the emotion are in exquisite balance, and the work has often as much of delicate simplicity as of fragile and flower-like perfection." 2 Higher still I higher From the earth then springest The When deep thon singest Tand As a singing still dost way to stening was singest All the earth & air- As when Night is base What thin art we know not As from thy prisend showers a rain of metody Fac-simile of Manuscript Page of Skylark. 8 THE SKYLARK AND ADONAIS. 66 To a Skylark. This ode, the most popular and the most perfect of Shelley's lyrics, was written in the poet's twenty-ninth year, two years before his death. This poem and the "Cloud," says Mrs. Shelley, "were written as his mind prompted, listening to the carolling of the bird, aloft in the azure sky of Italy, or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens, as he floated in his boat on the Thames." 'Describing the song of a skylark," says Prof. De Mille, "may be compared to an artist's attempt to paint a rainbow; yet in this attempt Shelley has not failed. He has tested to the uttermost the capacities of language, and has exhausted its resources in this wonderful ode. It is penetrated through and through with the spirit of the beautiful, and has more of high and pure poetic rapture than any other ode in existence." Wordsworth's "To a Skylark" and "To the Cuckoo" should be read with this poem for comparison. HAIL to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. 5 10 3. So Shakespeare begins the morning song for Imogen, in "Cymbeline:" Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings." 8. Prof. Craik maintains that the semi-colon should be after "springest," for the prosaic reason that "a cloud does not spring from the ground." This marking obviously would not give the poet's meaning. The lark is already high up in the sky and in the second stanza he is mounting "higher still," continuously, and swiftly like fire. (See Fac-simile). Compare Procter's lines in "In vocation to Birds," describing the lark's flight: "Sky-climbing bird, wakener of morn, Who springeth like a thought unto the sun." In the golden lightning O'er which clouds are brightning, Thou dost float and run; Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. · The pale purple even Melts around thy flight; Like a star of heaven, In the broad day-light Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, Keen as are the arrows Of that silver sphere, Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear, Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed. What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see, As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. 15. Unbodied: Many editions have "embodied," an "emendation" defended by Prof. Craik. Upon this Prof. Baynes comments thus: "To the swift sympathetic imagination of the poet, the scorner of the ground, floating far up in the golden light, had become an ærial rapture, a disembodied joy, a delighted spirit,' whose ethereal race had just begun. This is a representation at once profoundly poetical and profoundly true. But its force and consistency are destroyed by the so-called emendation." The мs. copy of the poem gives unbodied. 20. Compare Tennyson's "In Memoriam," cxv.: "And drowned in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song.' 21-25. In the poem "Evening" we have the "keen evening star," and in the "Cloud" the morning star "shines dead." Ruskin speaks of the long avalanches "cast down in keen streams brighter than the lightning." 31-32. The poet, unable to tell what this ethereal creature is, whether "sprite or bird," now tells what is most like this "blithe spirit' in a series |