and we know not as yet the rightful and unquestioned pos sessor. A falser system of philosophy than that which Shelley derived from the French writers of the 18th century, and recommended in his earlier works, can hardly be conceived. It required of man to divest himself of his rich inheritance of laws and recollections,-to form a new world by demolishing the old one,-and to assume that the living generation had been the first to break the fetters imposed upon mankind from their birth by the fraud and the credulity of their forefathers. Property and domestic rights were to be the first sacrifice to the new deity of unrestraint, and vegetable diet its ceremonial law. With a strange incoherence, the prophets of this latter dispensation indulged in glowing descriptions of the equal laws and unchartered life of antiquity, thus, in their zeal for innovation, overlooking the moral of ethnic no less than of Christian history,-that the resistance to the cosmopolite tendency of monarchies, and the defence of home-born institutions and ancestral manners, constituted whatever is noble and memorable in the history of the most civilised races of the ancient world. But a similar error is observable in the founders of all systems, from anabaptism to utilitarianism, who regard man as the creature of law, and not the law itself as only the most general exponent of individual action. And the fallacy consists in their viewing man in the aggregate, not as a living soul of complicate impulses and passions, moulded to his present state of social existence by progressive and providential causes, and most rarely by the feverous haste and presumption of a single age. But the imaginative and moral teachers who preceded the French revolution, and their disciples, resembled a fanatical mob of the 16th century more than the sage and serious instructors of their generation. In their lust for optimism, or that impossible good which is to be attained by the disruption of all hitherto held the safeguards of steady and progressive cultivation, they trampled upon the household bonds of life, and political subordination, and moral reverence. All the rich inheritance derived from their Teutonic ancestors, from the better parts of ethnic institutions and from Christianity, was rejected by them as something outworn and unmeaning, be cause some of the forms that had hitherto transmitted it from age to age were become sapless and withered, and no longer expressed the feelings in which they originated. Miserable reasoners are they who would make a church paramount to a state, but worse reasoners are those who would found a state without a church! They misunderstand antiquity, that, while it held fast to these polar principles of moral government, prospered in spite of barbaric force, of domestic treason and of calamity by war, pestilence and famine. They are insensible to the higher and more catholic civilization by which Christianity, with all the abuses of ecclesiastical power and among all the fluctuations of civil, and despite of the fraud of kings and the madness of the multitude, has knit Europe together into one brotherhood, and imparted whatever is substantial, whatever is progressive in national life to less fortunate portions of the world. We have been led away from Shelley; but it was necessary to call to mind the state of opinion in his youth, and the theories upon which his intellect prematurely fed. For men of imaginative temperaments no line of study has more attractions, and none is less salutary in early manhood, than the doctrine of political renovation. Even Milton, strictly disciplined as he was in all good learning, and living in an age when a severe apprenticeship was demanded of all who would gain the public ear, is too oftén a day-dreamer when he reasons upon government and the proper destiny of man. For the imaginative mind is essentially dramatic, and impersonates its own conceptions until it ends with taking them for substantial forms. But, fortunately for himself and his art, Milton's theories entered sparingly into his poetry; his zeal poured itself forth in controversies wherein he admits that he had the use of his left hand only. Shelley conceived that the noblest use of poetic powers was the recommendation of philosophic truth; but he did not sufficiently distinguish between assertive truth, which is the province of the imagination; and discursive truth, which is the business of the understanding. Hence the course of his poetry is broken up and narrowed by crude and ill-timed expressions of opinion, and the sense of pleasure derived from lofty thought and harmonious numbers impaired by sudden appeals to our understanding, our prejudices or our moral sense. From these defects the later poetry of Shelley is comparatively exempt; the harsh reception his works met with from the public was not without salutary results to himself; and he felt, although not until after his longer poems were composed, the necessity of selection and condensation. But it is probable that many portions of the Prometheus and the Revolt of Islam, which were less pleasing to contemporary readers from the injudicious mixture of poetic imagery with logical notions, will pass unnoticed hereafter. Other speculations will alarm or gratify the readers of another generation, even as we neglect the allegory and the political allusions in the Faery Queen, and derive a more intellectual pleasure from its tesselated legends than the courtiers and scholars of the Elizabethan age. We approximate in opinion and feeling to the poets of the 19th century too much to discern what will be permanent in their works. We have seen in our time too many revivals of once popular writers, and too many abortive attempts to resuscitate others, not to distrust experience and general laws, and not to make allowance for the accidents of oblivion and reputation. It is a more pleasant, though still a painful task, to turn from the philosophy of Shelley to his life, so much at least as we know of it from the unsatisfactory accounts hitherto published. What his biographers have omitted doing we cannot supply, since our narrative must break off and be resumed just as they are reserved or communicative. We shall therefore take Mrs. Shelley for our guide, and detail briefly the history of his principal poems, since they exhibit with sufficient exactness the history of the author's mind. The few extracts we can afford to make will thus come almost in chronological order, and will be at the same time a record of the feelings that prompted them. The blank verse of Queen Mab differs little from that measure as it appears in the poems of Akenside, who exercised considerable influence over such poets as escaped from the popular vortex of Darwinism. It is fitted for didactic poetry, and its chief defects are too great uniformity of cadence, and the predominance of single good lines without continuous harmony. But it was no mean promise of excellence in a youth of eighteen to modulate unrhymed lyrics with such grace and purity, as the following passage, among several that might be produced, displays. Ianthe and the Fairy Mab are come to the hall of spells in the fairy's palace. "If solitude hath ever led thy steps To the wild ocean's echoing shore, Seemed resting on the burnished wave, Hung o'er the sinking sphere: Thou must have marked the billowy clouds Towering like rocks of jet Crowned with a diamond wreath. And yet there is a moment When the sun's highest point Peeps like a star o'er ocean's western edge, Within the Fairy's fane. Yet not the golden islands Gleaming in yon flood of light Nor the feathery curtains Stretching o'er the sun's bright couch Paving that gorgeous dome, Whilst suns their mingled beamings darted And pearly battlements around Looked o'er the immense of Heaven." Shelley never lost this accumulative style, although acquaintance with better models went far to correct it. He could however lay it aside when the nature of the composition required, and the Cenci, though deficient in incident, is severe in diction. The above lines show a great facility of versification, and an ear accustomed to try and even to subtilize cadences. The former quality he carried into another language, and his Latin school-verses were composed with an ease and correctness that procured for him prizes, and caused him to be resorted to by all his friends for help. "He was," says Mrs. Shelley, "at the period of writing Queen Mab, a great traveller within the limits of England, Scotland, and Ireland. His time was spent among the loveliest scenes of these countries. Mountain and lake and forest were his home; the phenomena of nature were his favourite study. He loved to inquire into their causes, and was addicted to pursuits of natural philosophy and chemistry, as far as they could be carried on as an amusement. These tastes gave truth and vivacity to his descriptions, and warmed his soul with that deep admiration for the wonders of nature, which constant association with her inspired." The motto to Alastor is a sentence from the Confessions of Augustin; and there is something in common between these fervent outpourings of two ardent and intellectual temperaments, which renders that sentence an appropriate note of preparation to the solemn emotions of" the spirit of solitude." "It is written," the editor observes, "in a very different tone from Queen Mab." Shelley's first poem is the baseless fabric of a Saturnian age: Alastor, but in a better spirit than Childe Harold, is the poet's inner-being impersonated, and brought into immediate contact with nature under her manifold vicissitudes of repose and turbulence, of luxuriant life and primeval desolation. It opens with the doctrine of Pantheism under its most poetical form of contemplating the visible universe as the veil of a sentient spirit, of which the forms of matter are the emanations. The ascendency of nature over human passion, the subsidence of thought, of feeling and of youthful aspiration in early death, the sympathy of nature with her worshiper, the education of the poet through the medium of his own sensations, and by no meaner symbols than such as gladdened or awed man in his imagined state of primitive strength and beauty, with the fruitless quest for the reflection and counterpart of the inner-self, the androgyne of Plato, the ideal Laura that, in the imagination of Petrarca, obscured and glorified at once the actual Laura,—of such profound and subtile imagery is the Alastor made up. With |