of Job, but of which, though he never abandoned the design, no trace remains among his papers. The third was the Prometheus Unbound. And his choice was probably determined by his familiarity with the Greek tragic writers, at this time the constant companions of his wanderings and his solitude. But Shelley's sensibilities were too active and luxuriant for the severe and select meditation such a subject required. He had yet to learn the art of suspecting the imagery and the emotions which come unsolicited to the poet, and that it is the often-tried and tested residue of these which alone sinks into, and obtains the mastery over the inner-being of the few, and is by them gradually imparted to the many. Not that Shelley composed carelessly, and without a befitting respect for his readers. His blotted and interlined manuscripts, his unwearied pentimentos, show the contrary. But conceiving, unfortunately, that his vocation as a reformer was superior to his vocation as a poet, that his days were few and numbered, and the urgency of the "disjointed times" he lived in great, he composed with the haste and anxiety of one who has a present end to secure, whose well-being depends on its success, and not with the hope and gladness and untiring fortitude of him who designs and is conscious that the work under his hands will be a "possession for ever." In the opening scenes of the Prometheus Unbound, a certain breadth and grandeur in the conception and language of the drama remind us of Eschylus, and an occasional severity in the images gives an intensity to the emotions not usual with Shelley. These, however, are not sustained beyond the first act, and are frequently lost within it. And it is singular that the author of the unrhymed lyrics in Queen Mab should, in a" lyrical drama," have been contented with choral songs so loose in their structure, inexpressive, and not seldom unmelodious as those in the Prometheus. In the Posthumous Works of Shelley, the most unfinished fragments often display a subtile and delicate intuition of melody in verse which no carelessness in conception or language can injure or conceal. In the Prometheus, on the contrary, beautiful thoughts and happy images are perpetually marred and lost in the obscure or glittering maze of the verses in which they are set. "The lyrics of this drama," we are told by the editor, were

intended to "develope the abstruse and imaginative theories" of Shelley "with regard to the creation. It requires a mind "as subtle and penetrating as his own to understand the my"stic meanings scattered throughout the poem." This, which is hardly an excuse for vagueness of language in philosophy, is none in poetry; and Shelley's acquaintance with Lucretius, Empedocles, and with the Gnomic poets of Greece, must have taught him that difficult, abstruse and recondite meanings may be clothed in pure and perspicuous diction. It could only have been a wilfully erroneous theory of his art which led him, at this season of life, to combine in almost an equal proportion the vices of Marino with those of Lycophron. It was a theory, however, from which he soon escaped, since the next great work he undertook and executed was the Cenci.

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Shelley's poems, the editor remarks, may be divided into two classes the purely imaginative, and those which sprung from the emotions of his heart. Among the former may be placed The Witch of Atlas, Adonais, and his latest composition, left imperfect, The Triumph of Life. And in this class we are persuaded will be found the purest and most permanent records of his genius. For Shelley resembled Spenser in the abundance of his objective stores, in his delight in the beautiful and the perennial freshness of eloquence. Spenser, however, after a few early attempts in a wrong direction, came to a clear knowledge of the real nature of his poetic powers, and left to others the more arduous field of passion and character, while he moved in gladness and freedom through the whole domain of pure imagination. Shelley's fertility in educing and combining his objective resources from the contemplation of nature and the study of books, and from the forms embodied in painting and sculpture, concealed from himself that the faculties of construction and invention were not given him in an equal degree. We can therefore perfectly understand that his Cenci and the fragment of Charles I. were produced with infinite labour, while the Prometheus and the Revolt flowed almost spontaneously from his pen. His fancy was equally suggestive, his imagination equally creative of bright and beautiful thoughts, in all that he undertook; but form and character are the

slow growth of observation and experience, and require a severe apprenticeship to the secrets of art and the real workings of life.

We have reluctantly pointed out the defects of a poet, who, beyond any other of his contemporaries, has filled us with wonder and delight, even where we found most occasion to regret the obliquity of his moral theories, and condemn the haste and temerity of his political speculations. But between the indiscreet praise of those who defended, and the unwarranted censure of those who attacked him, there seemed to us a middle course, by which, without any concession of principle as critics, the substantial grounds of his reputation might be determined. The easier and pleasanter part of our task remains, the consideration of that portion of his works which belongs to the purely imaginative class, and of his master-work in a higher department of art than any he had attempted before, in which he sacrificed the peculiar vices of his style to a simple energy of conception and diction.

It may seem strange to place Shelley's Odes to Liberty and Naples, prompted as they were by immediate feelings of hope and exultation, among poems of the imagination rather than among those in which he embodied his own emotions and desires. Yet an examination of these odes will show that they belong really to the former class. Shelley did not possess invention in any remarkable degree; it bore no proportion to his other intellectual powers, his imagination or his eloquence. Hence he always wrote with more dignity and truth when his subject confined him to a fixed plan and division. But his fertility of illustrating by splendid image and metaphor was inexhaustible; and in his odes, written on occasion, the intensity of sympathy and excitement superseded all abstract theorizing, and brought with it the befitting forms into which his imagination was ever ready to breathe beauty and motion. And it has always appeared to us inexplicable, that the same poet in the Prometheus Unbound should have so mistaken the structure and the scope of lyric poetry, and produced almost contemporarily the Ode to Naples. The epode and two following strophes, for sustained majesty and melody, are equal to anything in modern literature, and are warmly applauded by the critics of a nation

that reckons Filicaia and Manzoni among its lyrical writers.

"I stood within the city disinterred;

And heard the autumnal leaves, like light footfalls
Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard
The mountain's slumberous voice at intervals
Thrill through those roofless halls;
The oracular thunder penetrating shook

The listening soul in my suspended blood;

I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke

I felt but heard not :—through white columns glowed
The isle-sustaining Ocean flood,

A plane of light between two heavens of azure :
Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre
Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure
Were to spare Death, had never made erasure;
But every living lineament was clear

As in the Sculptor's thought; and there
The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy and pine,
Like winter leaves o'ergrown by moulded snow,
Seemed only not to move and grow

Because the crystal silence of the air

Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine,
Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.
"Then gentle winds arose,

With many a mingled close

Of wild Eolian sound and mountain odour keen;
And where the Baian ocean

Welters with airlike motion,

Within, above, around its bowers of starry green,
Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves,
Even as the ever stormless atmosphere

Floats o'er the Elysian realm,

It bore me like an Angel, o'er the waves
Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air
No storm can overwhelm ;

I sailed, where ever flows
Under the calm Serene
A spirit of deep emotion
From the unknown graves

Of the dead Kings of Melody.
Shadowy Aornos darkened o'er the helm
The horizontal æther; heaven stript bare
Its depths over Elysium, where the prow
Made the invisible water white as snow;
From that Typhœan mount Inarime

There streamed a sunlike vapour, like the standard

Of some ethereal host;

Whilst from all the coast,

Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered
Over the oracular woods and divine sea
Prophesyings which grew articulate-

They seize me—I must speak them-be they fate."

It would be idle, and almost insulting to point out to persons at all acquainted with modern English poetry such compositions as the Ode to a Skylark, pronounced, we believe, by no less an authority than Mr. Wordsworth, to be the "triumph of Shelley's art,"-or the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, conceived during a voyage round the Lake of Geneva in company with lord Byron, and while the author was occupied in reading the Nouvelle Héloïse for the first time, or the Ode to the West Wind, in which is a comparison as beautiful and bold as some in Eschylus:

"Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Manad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,

The locks of the approaching storm."

But we cannot pass over so cursorily the Hymn of Apollo, because in the severe simplicity and selection of the diction we have an instance of Shelley's power over the forms of poetry, whenever his attention was given to his art rather than to the moral or political uses it might be made to serve. It reminds one of the ethnic completeness of Goethe in some of his shorter poems:

"The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie,
Curtained with star-enwoven tapestries,
From the broad moonlight of the sky,

Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes,—
Waken me when their Mother the gray Dawn,
Tells them that dreams and that the moon is gone.
"Then I arise, and climbing Heaven's blue dome,
I walk over the mountains and the waves,
Leaving my robe upon the ocean foam;

My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves
Are filled with my bright presence, and the air
Leaves the green earth to my embraces bare.