connected with higher intellectual experiences, are reproduced by the lyric poet. For the singing of many of the substantial joys and sorrows of humanity, Shelley was not specially qualified either by temperament or by experience. His abnormal physical and mental constitution made him much less fit for such a task than many of his predecessors. On the other hand, the peculiarities and intensity of his nature did furnish him with the experience which fitted him to be the exponent of more subtle and impalpable states of mind. More particularly, his feeble hold on reality, his discontent with existing things, the disposition to take refuge from them in the realm of his own thoughts and fancies, enabled him to write of the feelings connected with the ideal, the remote, the impalpable. In the substantial present Shelley did not much delight; but the future, with its possibilities and its promise of perfections not yet realized, and the past, with that halo of imaginative beauty which does not belong to it when in our grasp, but which it wins as it recedes, these were themes that suited his genius. We see this illustrated when he writes of love. "No one," says Mr. Stopford Brooke, "has expressed so well the hopes and fears and fancies and dreams which the heart creates for its own pleasure and sorrow when it plays with love which it realizes within itself, but which it never means to realize without. But still more perfect, and perhaps more beautiful than any other work of his, are the poems written in the realm of ideal Regret. Whenever he came close to earthly love, touched it, and then of his own will passed it by, it became, as he looked back upon it, ideal, and a part of that indefinite world he loved. The ineffable regret of having lost that which one did not choose to take is most marvelAlously, most passionately expressed by Shelley." Here, as elsewhere, he does not sing the joys of satisfaction, for he was never satisfied, but the yearnings of desire. Again,

there are emotional sequences which are scarcely connected with anything actual, or, at least, with anything definitely realized, such emotions as are expressed and aroused by music. These are too vague to be called thought or to be uttered as such, but Shelley is skilled in suggesting them in an indirect way, through analogies, imagery, and the music of verse. Again and again this power is illustrated in the Prometheus. Even when the feelings which he voices are based upon substantial experiences, Shelley is so wrapped up in the emotion that he neglects altogether, or vaguely indicates, the concrete causes. Hence such obscurity as we find in Julian and Maddalo, where the facts which would enable us to grasp the situation of the poor lunatic are withheld. Facts," says Shelley, "are not what we want to know in poetry, in history, in the lives of individual men, Jin satire, or in panegyric. They are the mere divisions, the arbitrary points on which we hang, and to which we refer those delicate and evanescent hues of mind which language delights and instructs us in proportion as it expresses.' All this gives a vagueness to Shelley's poetry which almost forbids analysis or reduction to a kernel of solid fact. The hard-headed man who may be able to appreciate the good sense and accurate observation enshrined in the plays of Shakespeare, but who has little experience of or care for the subtle feelings and vague aspirations belonging to imaginative and emotional natures, and on whom the purely technical graces of verse have but little effect, turns aside from the poetry of Shelley as meaningless rhetoric.

Shelley's love for the ideal and the vague influences his treatment of material nature. Here, with a tendency analogous to that exhibited in his treatment of human life, he turns from scenery of an ordinary character to the unusual, gigantic, and mysterious,-huge cliffs, vast mountains, dark woods and caves. Indeed, much of the scenery of his

poems is not, strictly speaking, natural scenery. It is scenery whose elements are, of course, taken from nature; but these are magnified and brought together in novel combinations, with the purpose, not so much of reproducing or suggesting nature as of reflecting or symbolizing the poet's feelings, or of forming a suitable background for them. Not that Shelley always does this; he can also bring before us vivid pictures of actual nature, a gift which belonged to all the great poets of his time. But here he has his own special sphere. The aspects of nature which he excels in rendering are those, as Mr. Stopford Brooke has pointed out, of a vast, indefinite, or changeful character, the scenery of the sky, of storm and cloud, of sunset and sunrise, or of wide landscapes like that "which the poet in Alastor looks upon from the edge of a mountain precipice.” He delighted in scenery reflected in the water; the softened, impalpable, and suggestive character of the image, as compared with the scene of which it is the reflection, is analogous to the difference between the ideal and the actual.

In another and very different way, Shelley introduces nature in his poetry. There is a stage in the development of the race in which men commonly conceive all active things in the world as beings with a conscious life of their own. This is the mythopoeic tendency which plays so important a part in early religion and fable. As men advance, the faculty for so conceiving things falls into abeyance. More profound and philosophic theories as to the forces which we see about us, displace this simple method of accounting for the universe. But in children the old tendency remains; we see it strikingly illustrated in the story of a poet's childhood, which Browning tells in Sordello. Shelley, who was childlike in so many respects, in his impetuosity, simplicity, and ignorance of the world, and who had no sense of the immanence of a personal force manifesting itself

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in all the phenomena of the universe, possessed this mythopœic faculty to a degree unparalleled among later poets. Instead of using nature as a basis for meditation on human life or as a medium to reflect his own moods, instead of seeing in its phenomena, as does Wordsworth, the workings of one divine being, Shelley is frequently content, for the nonce, to look upon various objects in nature as independent beings, each leading its own conscious life. He sympathizes with such an entity, and describes its imaginary experiences, as another poet might enter into and describe the life of a fellow-man. He does this in The Cloud, in Arethusa, and repeatedly in the Prometheus, in the case of such characters as "The Earth" and "The Moon." Perhaps the most extreme case of the exercise of this faculty is that afforded by The Witch of Atlas, where he describes, not the personification of an abstract quality or of a natural object, but a purely fanciful being. In this poem he finds pleasure in his own creations without desire to bring them to bear upon human life, or to give them anything which ordinary men would call a meaning.

As the peculiarities of Shelley's mind and temperament leave their impress upon the general character of the substance of his writings, so they determine the peculiarities of his form and style. His defective grasp of the concrete and real is unfavorable to the structure of his poems. His stories lack narrative force; his thought, consecutive development. This is one of the reasons why he is less successful in his longer and more ambitious works. Further, the abstract ideas which he conveys in most of these longer poems do not lend themselves to the concrete expression which poetry demands. Accordingly, he almost necessarily resorts to allegory and symbolism, as is illustrated by Alastor and Prometheus; and allegory and symbolism chill the normal reader. In the men and women of Romeo and Juliet or of

Hamlet we are naturally interested; they are creatures like ourselves. But it is only by an effort that we can overcome our initial distaste for the personified abstractions of the Prometheus.

—we

As to his expression in a narrower sense, add to what we have already noted in Shelley's mental constitution, an extraordinarily lavish endowment of specifically poetic gifts, -skill in language, imagery, and versification, we have the main factors in his style. We do not expect in him the qualities which arise from untiring self-criticism, from respect to the accepted canons of poetic art, such as we find in a workman like Tennyson. Shelley writes under the influence of the poetic afflatus. He is content if he gives expression. to his feelings and ideas, without being careful to note occasional defects in logical structure, in grammatical concord, in congruity of images, in the regularity of his prosody. Here, as in more practical matters, he sometimes lacks selfrestraint. He does not sufficiently condense; he is carried on by the flow of language and imagery until thought is obscured or lost in musical words. But amends are made for occasional faults of this character by a spontaneous felicity, an unsought and unconventional grace to which a more conscious and less ardent artist could not have attained. This happiness is perhaps most easily noted in versification. As the unimaginative spirit will fail to appreciate Shelley's poetry in general, so will the pedantic student of metre who depends upon his fingers and his rules, fail to appreciate the subtle and varied music of Shelley's lines.

As to this and other matters in regard to his style, we cannot do better than quote the words of Professor Baynes:1 "This uncritical negligence, the want of minute accuracy in the details of his verse, seems to us intimately connected

1 Edinburgh Review, April, 1871; quoted in Mr. Forman's Preface to his edition of Shelley.