of the Manchester massacre * and by the thought of the oppression and misery at home. Among these are The Masque of Anarchy, in which Murder appears as Lord Castlereagh and Fraud as Lord Eldon, with its passionate appeal to the people to rise against their oppressors; "England in 1819," and "The Song to the Men of England." In these poems the democratic sympathies of Shelley take a passionate and distinctly practical form. The brief space between 1818 and his untimely death in 1822 is the period of Shelley's greatest work. Year by year the fullness of his genius was revealing itself. He had learned of life and of suffering; his faith was deepening, his mind maturing through experience and incessant study. He was becoming a more consummate master of his art. That labyrinthine profusion of fancy and imagery, which dazzles and confuses us in many of his earlier poems by its very splendor and excess, is chastened and restrained in his later songs, which stand pre-eminent among the most exquisite creations of lyric art. But English poetry was to suffer a sudden and irreparable loss. In 1822, while sailing on the Gulf of Leghorn, Shelley was caught in a squall off the Via Reggia and perished. So swiftly and so terribly did that breath of the Eternal, whose might he had invoked in song, descend upon him. †

Criticism can do but little toward helping us to an appreciation of Shelley's character and work. We dare not attempt by any cold analysis to reach the secrets of a nature so intricately and exquisitely fash*V. p. 296, supra.

V. last stanza of Adonais.

ioned; to apportion praise and blame, or to reconcile real or apparent contradictions. He was denounced by his contemporaries for acts and opinions which were rightly considered immoral and hurtful to the order and happiness of society. No admiration for Shelley should lead us to think lightly of his faults or blind us to their disastrous consequences. How far he was morally responsible for erroneous principles sincerely held we need not here inquire; what we should realize is that his wrong actions were in conformity with what he himself believed to be right. To be just to him we must identify ourselves, for the time, with his view of life. We must realize also the nobility of many of his aims, his childlike purity and innocence, which shrank back pained and perplexed at the defilements of the world.

Shelley's poetry, like his nature, must be known through sympathy rather than through criticism. No English poet is more remote from those tangible facts of life which daily engross us, none has fewer points of contact with the average mental state of the average man. Like his Skylark, Shelley mounts from the earth as a cloud of fire; and his song reaches us from blue aërial heights. If we have an answering touch of his nature, if we have it in us to leave the ground, we shall be caught up likewise into those luminous and unfathomable spaces where he sings. To understand Shelley, we must recall those moments when some deep feeling has shaken the dominion of the ordinary in us, when the familiar has grown strange to us and the spiritual near, or perhaps when

a vague desire for a something unguessed has possessed us then, if we imagine those feelings intensified a hundred fold, we are within sight of the confines of Shelley's world. This, indeed, is more particularly applicable to his larger and more difficult works, as The Witch of Atlas and Epipsychidion; many of his shorter and more familiar poems are free from obscurity, yet full of Shelley's peculiar magic. In his purely lyrical faculty, his power to sing, Shelley is perhaps without a parallel in English poetry.

STUDY LIST

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

1. Adonais. Given in Hales' Longer English Poems, with notes. Cf. note on Lycidas and the elegy in the Milton Study List. Cf. also Moschus' Lament for Bion, and Bion's Lament for Adonis—the latter translated by Mrs. Browning. Do you think Shelley expresses in this poem a belief in personal immortality? If not, what is the teaching of the poem on this point.

2. The Sensitive Plant; Alastor.

3. SHORTER POEMS. The Skylark, see Keats Study List, 82; The Cloud; Ode to the West Wind; Arethusa; Lines written among the Euganean Hills; Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples; Mont Blanc; Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni (cf. Coleridge's Mont Blanc); Mutability, a Lament (v. Wordsworth Study List, on loss of early feeling for nature, § 1, c); One Word is too often Profaned. In studying Shelley as a lyric poet the reader should turn, in addition to the above, to the choruses in Prometheus Bound and Hellas. Note particularly the "Life of Life, thy Lips Enkindle" from the former, and the last chorus from the latter of these two poems.

4. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM. Dowden's Life of Shelley, 2 vols., is the standard work on the subject. Shelley's life has been written for the Great Writers Series by William Sharp, and for the English Men of Letters Series by J. A. Symonds. Essays on the Prometheus Unbound, by Vida D. Scudder, Atlantic Monthly for 1892 are interesting and suggestive.

JOHN KEATS.-1795-1821

The inclination to associate Keats with Byron and Shelley, his contemporaries in poetry, is natural, but in many ways misleading. It is true Keats, Byron, that the three poets were not far apart and Shelley. in age, and that none of them lived to be old. It is true that each in his own way expressed some phase or quality of youth: Byron, its ungoverned passions and ill-considered despairs; Shelley, its generous, if visionary, aspirations ; Keats, its freshness of unquestioning enjoyment, its undulled and exquisite sensibility to the beauty of the things of sense. But the points of difference between Keats and the older members of the group greatly exceed these more accidental or external marks of resemblance. While Shelley's noble tribute to Keats' memory and genius in Adonais links the two poets together in our thoughts, the personal relations between them were extremely slight, and in the nature of their genius they were widely different. Byron and Keats were even more widely separated. Byron speaks contemptuously both of Keats and of his poetry, while Keats, on his part, shows no trace of Byron's influence. In truth Keats was entirely apart from the democratic and revolutionary movement to which Byron and Shelley belonged.

Those kindred impulses, the pity for human suffering and the "passion for reforming the world," which had been a growing inspiration and power in English poetry from Thomson to Shelley, are absolutely alien to the poetry of Keats. His genius draws its nourishment from widely different sources, and to understand his relation to literary history we must approach him as the bringer of a fresh impulse into English poetry, the force of which is not yet spent.

Keats' life.

Byron and Shelley, the poets of democracy, were representatives of the aristocratic class; Keats was the son of the head hostler in a livery stable at Moorfields, London. The poet's father, Thomas Keats, had married the daughter of his employer, and succeeded to the management of the business at the Swan and Hoop. There John, the eldest child, was born October 31, 1795. As a boy he appears to have been at first chiefly remarkable for beauty of face, courage, and pugnacity. According to the painter Haydon, who knew him well in after years, he was, "when an infant, a most violent and ungovernable child." When about seven or eight years old he was sent to a school at Enfield, a small town some ten miles north of London. Here fighting according to one of his schoolfellowswas meat and drink to him." He is described as violent and generous, as always in extremes,' 99 66 in passions of tears or outrageous fits of laughter."* He was a general favorite, yet he was often morbidly miserable and given to groundless suspicions of his

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*This schoolfellow was Edward Holmes, v. Colvin's Keats. pp. 7, 8.