a felicity rare in Shelley's longer works, the form is the appropriate clothing of the thought; and the occasional obscurity arises from the extreme subtilty of the ideas more than from its usual cause-a diseased activity of the fancy and understanding. We need scarcely remark, that the scenery of Alastor, as well as the emotions depicted, are idealized, and therefore so long as they respond to one another with equal intensity, it is not a legitimate objection to say the descriptions are impossible. But indeed no one of Shelley's poems is so characteristic as this. Less vague than the Prometheus, less modern than the Revolt of Islam, it does not alternately delight and disappoint us, nor leave us doubtful whether the same truths might not have been much better inculcated in prose. Like the Witch of Atlas, it requires an initiative faith, but its unity is apparent so soon as we step within its precincts.

The immediate occasion of the composition of Alastor is detailed in the editor's notes, and it illustrates Shelley's propensity to project and idealize home-scenery and familiar objects-the characteristic of his own works, the inimitable error which has baffled his copyists.

"The later summer months of 1815 were warm and dry. Accompanied by a few friends, he visited the source of the Thames, making the voyage in a wherry from Windsor to Cricklade. His beautiful stanzas in the churchyard of Lechlade were written on that occasion. Alastor was composed on his return. He spent his days under the oak shades of Windsor Great Park; and the magnificent woodland was a fitting study to inspire the various descriptions of forest scenery in the poem."

We have not space for the Stanzas in Lechlade churchyard; they bear to Alastor the relation of the germ to the fruit, "a picture in little " of the same sensations: we know nowhere two more beautiful couplets than those which close the first and second stanzas of the earlier poem.

"Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,

Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.
"The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass
Knows not their gentle motions as they pass."

The poems written about the same time with Alastor evince an intensity of sensation, connected probably with disease, but indicating a purer vein of poetic feeling than some of his later works. Shelley was indeed " of imagination all

compact:" his political speculations were coarse earthy veins striking across and obstructing the finer portions of his mind; he mistook his vocation when he would impress upon these the image of his intellectual being: in poems with a political aim he "had the use of his left hand only."

The Revolt of Islam only occupied six months, and The Prometheus Unbound fewer weeks in composition. We believe them to be the least readable and permanent of his poetical works; the one, from its essentially modern spirit, embracing and embodying notions and speculations in the room of realities and truth; the other, from the comparison forced upon the reader with the dramatic treatment of the most solemn myth of antiquity. Passages of great beauty and completeness might be cited from the Revolt of Islam, but they are descriptive or reflective: the action of the poem proceeds heavily and feebly, and no human interest attaches itself to the mere personifications of good and evil that carry on the story. Among the most beautiful stanzas of the poem, which as a metrical work of art can hardly be commended enough, are those at the opening of the 4th Canto; they proceed however but little way in the same spirit of quiet and happy sensation.

I.

"The old man took the oars, and soon the bark
Smote on the beach beside a tower of stone;

It was a crumbling heap, whose portal dark

With blooming ivy-trails was overgrown;

Upon whose floor the spangling sands were strown,
And rarest sea-shells, which the eternal flood,
Slave to the mother of the months, had thrown

Within the walls of that grey tower, which stood
A changeling of man's art, nursed amid Nature's brood.

II.

"When the old man his boat had anchored,
He wound me in his arms with tender care,
And very few, but kindly words he said,
And bore me through the tower adown a stair,
Whose smooth descent some ceaseless step to wear
For many a year had fallen.-We came at last
To a small chamber, which with mosses rare
Was tapestried, where me his soft hand placed
Upon a couch of grass and oak-leaves interlaced.

III.

"The moon was darting through the lattices
Its yellow light, warm as the beams of day-
So warm, that to admit the dewy breeze
The old man opened them; the moonlight lay
Upon a lake whose waters wove their play
Even to the threshold of that lonely home :
Within was seen in the dim wavering ray,

The antique sculptured roof, and many a tome
Whose lore had made that sage all that he had become.

Had the whole effect of the poem been equal to this and many other passages that might have been detached, the graceful fancy and harmonious verse of Ariosto would have found a rival in Shelley. But his political idealisms and experiments upon public taste and morals mar the mild beauty and quietude of his descriptions. Everywhere the "disjecta membra❞ of poetry may be found, nowhere an artistic whole in the longer compositions of Shelley.

Mr. Landor, no incompetent judge, has pronounced Shelley incomparably the most elegant, graceful, and harmonious of the prose-writers of the present age." And the Prefaces to the Revolt of Islam and Prometheus are more beautiful and sustained than the poems themselves. In the former he has described, in the proper education of a poet, a portion of his own intellectual history: and the union of ardent aspiration for an immortal name, with a humble diffidence of his own power of attaining it, renders the passage one of the most delightful of those in which authors have admitted an audience to their self-communings.

"There is an education peculiarly fitted for a poet, without which genius and sensibility can hardly fill the circle of their capacities. No education indeed can entitle to this appellation a dull and unobservant mind, or one, though neither dull nor unobservant, in which the channels of communication between thought and expression have been obstructed or closed. How far it is my fortune to belong to either of the latter classes I cannot know. I aspire to be something better. The circumstances of my accidental education have been favourable to this ambition, I have been fa

miliar from boyhood with mountains and lakes, and the sea and the solitude of forests: danger, which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change amongst assembled multitudes of men. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country, has been to me, like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment. Such are the sources from which the materials for the imagery of my poem have been drawn. I have considered poetry in its most comprehensive sense, and have read the poets and the historians, and the metaphysicians whose writings have been accessible to me, and have looked upon the beautiful and majestic scenery of the earth as common sources of those elements which it is the province of the poet to embody and combine. Yet the experience and the feelings to which I refer, do not in themselves constitute men poets, but only prepare them to be the auditors of those who are. How far I shall be found to possess that more essential attribute of poetry, the power of awakening in others sensations like those which animate my own bosom, is that which, to speak sincerely, I know not; and which, with an acquiescent and contented spirit, I expect to be taught by the effect which I shall produce upon those whom I now address."

In the notes to the Prometheus Unbound, Mrs. Shelley gives an extract from one of Shelley's letters written in 1817, soon before he quitted England, never to return to it. In it he describes a singular nervous excitement which throws some light upon the besetting sins of his poetry and his intellectual temperament. "My health," he says, "has been materially

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worse. My feelings at intervals are of a deadly and torpid "kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and keen "excitement, that only to instance the organ of sight, I find "the very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees pre"sent themselves to me with microscopic distinctness." No description of Shelley's poetic style when he wrote the Prometheus, although he was then partially restored by a warm climate and leaving behind him many painful circumstances and associations, would serve so well as this sentence to show how unlike his dramatic poem is to the Chained Prometheus of Eschylus. Shelley has produced a chaos of poetic material without symmetry and without even formal unity. He was an enthusiastic student of Greek literature, especially in later years; but in the Prometheus we nowhere find, what some of his critics have insisted on, the impress of an ethnic feeling,

the power of adopting ancient modes of thought to his own creations. We suspect that at any period of his life Shelley was of too restless a temperament passively to imbibe the thoughts and forms of another, however deeply he might venerate his example as an artist. In studying the laws of beauty and proportion in the works of antiquity with reference to his own compositions, he has neither the rapid intuition of what was capable of reproduction, which Schiller displayed in his Bride of Messina, nor the intellectual calmness of Goethe in analysing and selecting what fitted his peculiar purpose. Shelley works out his thought by aggregation, seldom by single touches or felicitous strokes ; probably he felt in the same way what was excellent in others. He is eminently the poet of the remote and the future; the ancient idea of destiny was too palpable and sensuous for him, and he takes refuge from it in the illimitable field of time and chance. But the interest of the myth of Prometheus consists in its universal humanity, not in following out the several phases of an ideal perfectibility. The sufferings of the Titan are in the body; Shelley, by transferring them to the mind, has weakened the effect of the chain and the riven rocks, of the space and silence and solitude, broken only by the beat of wings, the gentle voices of the Oceanides, and the far-off moaning of the sea. To ancient apprehensions the consummate act in the Trilogy of Prometheus is the unbinding of the Titan by Hercules. Shelley despatches this in a stage-direction, if such a term may be applied to a composition that sets even an imaginary representation at defiance. Hence a fourth act became necessary to give sufficient importance to the event for which the two first are the preparation. But the addition is destructive of the proper catastrophe of the drama, and removes it further from that unity which gives to the Eschylean story its statuesque grandeur and repose.

The first aspect of Italy and the influence of a more genial climate, awakened to new life the poetical spirit in Shelley. He meditated, at this time, three subjects as the groundwork for lyrical dramas ;-one was the story of Tasso. Mrs. Shelley does not say whether Goethe's Torquato Tasso in any way suggested the idea. A song of Tasso is all that remains of his studies. The other was founded on the book