Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be

With the fears and the love for that which we see?"

We will make one more extract, from a strange and unintelligible fragment of a poem, entitled "The Dæmon of the World." It is exceedingly beautiful.

"How wonderful is Death,

Death and his brother Sleep!

One pale as yonder wan and horned moon,
With lips of lurid blue,

The other glowing like the vital morn,
When throned on ocean's wave

It breathes over the world:

Yet both so passing strange and wonderful!
Hath then the iron-sceptered Skeleton,
Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres,
To the hell dogs that couch beneath his throne
Cast that fair prey? Must that divinest form,
Which love and admiration cannot view
Without a beating heart, whose azure veins
Steal like dark streams along a field of snow,
Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed
In light of some sublimest mind, decay?
Nor putrefaction's breath

Leave aught of this pure spectacle

But loathsomeness and ruin ?-"

"Or is it but that downy-winged slumbers

Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near her lids
To watch their own repose ?"

"Ianthe doth not sleep

The dreamless sleep of death:

Nor in her moonlight chamber silently

Doth Henry hear her regular pulses throb,

Or mark her delicate cheek

With interchange of hues mock the broad moon
Outwatching weary night,

Without assured reward.

Her dewy eyes are closed;

On their translucent lids, whose texture fine

Scarce hides the dark blue orbs that burn below

With unapparent fire,

The baby Sleep is pillowed:

Her golden tresses shade

The bosom's stainless pride,

Twining like tendrils of the parasite

Around a marble column."

We beg leave, in conclusion, to say a few words about the treatment which Mr. Shelley has, in his poetical character, received from the public. By our periodical critics, he has either been entirely overlooked, or slightingly noticed, or grossly abused. There is not so much to find fault with in the mere silence of critics; but we do not hesitate to say, with all due respect for the general character of that journal, that Mr. Shelley has been infamously and stupidly treated in the Quarterly Review. His Reviewer there,

whoever he is, does not show himself a man of such lofty princi ples as to entitle him to ride the high horse in company with the author of the Revolt of Islam. And when one compares the vis inertiae of his motionless prose, with the "eagle-winged raptures" of Mr. Shelley's poetry, one does not think, indeed, of Satan reproving Sin, but one does think, we will say it in plain words, and without a figure, of a dunce rating a man of genius. If that critic does not know that Mr. Shelley is a poet, almost in the very highest sense of that mysterious word, then, we appeal to all those whom we have enabled to judge for themselves, if he be not unfit to speak of poetry before the people of England. If he does know that Mr. Shelley is a great poet, what manner of man is he, who, with such conviction, brings himself, with the utmost difficulty, to admit that there is any beauty at all in Mr. Shelley's writings, and is happy to pass that admission off with an accidental and niggardly phrase of vague and valueless commendation. This is manifest and mean glaring and gross injustice on the part of a man who comes forward as the champion of morality, truth, faith, and religion. This is being guilty of one of the very worst charges of which he accuses another; nor will any man who loves and honours genius, even though that genius may have occasionally suffered itself to be both stained and led astray, think but with contempt, and indignation, and scorn, of a critic, who, while he pretends to wield the weapons of honour, virtue, and truth, yet clothes himself in the armour of deceit, hypocrisy, and falsehood. He exults to calumniate Mr. Shelley's moral character, but he fears to acknowledge his genius. And therefore do we, as the sincere, though sometimes sorrowing friends of Mr. Shelley, scruple not to say, even though it may expose us to the charge of personality from those from whom alone such a charge could at all affect our minds, that the critic shows himself by such conduct, as far inferior to Mr. Shelley as a man of worth, as the language in which he utters his falsehood and uncharitableness, shows him to be inferior as a man of intellect.

In the present state of public feeling, with regard to poets and poetry, a critic cannot attempt to defraud a poet of his fame, without paying the penalty either of his ignorance or his injustice. So long as he confines the expression of his envy or stupidity to works of moderate or doubtful merit, he may escape punishment; but if he dare to insult the spirit of England by contumelious and scornful treatment of any one of her gifted sons, that contumely and that scorn will most certainly be flung back upon himself, till he be made to shrink and to shiver beneath the load. It is not in the power of all the critics alive, to blind one true lover of poetry to the splendour of Mr. Shelley's genius-and the reader who, from mere curiosity, should turn to the Revolt of Islam to see what sort

of trash it was that so moved the wrath, and the spleen, and the scorn of the Reviewer, would soon feel, that to understand the greatness of the poet, and the littleness of his traducer, nothing more was necessary than to recite to his delighted sense, any six successive stanzas of that poem, so full of music, imagination, intellect, and passion. We care comparatively little for injustice of fered to one moving majestical in the broad day of fame: it is the injustice done to the great while their greatness is unknown or misunderstood, that a generous nature most abhors, inasmuch as it seems more basely wicked to wish that genius might never lift its head, than to envy the glory with which it is encircled.

There is, we firmly believe, a strong love of genius in the people of this country, and they are willing to pardon to its possessor much extravagance and error-nay, even more serious transgressions. Let both Mr. Shelley and his critic think of that-let it encourage the one to walk onwards to his bright destiny, without turning into dark, or doubtful, or wicked ways-let it teach the other to feel a proper sense of his own insignificance, and to be ashamed, in the midst of his own weaknesses, and deficiencies, and meannesses, to aggravate the faults of the highly-gifted, and to gloat with a sinful satisfaction on the real or imaginary debasement of genius and intellect.

And here we ought, perhaps, to stop. But the Reviewer has dealt out a number of dark and oracular denunciations against the Poet, which the public can know nothing about, except that they imply a charge of immorality and wickedness. Let him speak out plainly, or let him hold his tongue. There are many wicked and foolish things in Mr. Shelley's creed, and we have not hitherto scrupled, nor shall we henceforth scruple to expose that wickedness and that folly. But we do not think that he believes his own creed at least, that he believes it fully and to utter conviction— and we doubt not but the scales will yet all fall from his eyes. The Reviewer, however, with a face of most laughable horror, accuses Mr. Shelley in the same breath, of some nameless act of atrocity, and of having been rusticated, or expelled, or warned to go away from the University of Oxford! He seems to shudder with the same holy fear at the violation of the laws of morality, and the breaking of college rules. He forgets that in the world men do not wear caps and gowns as at Oriel or Exeter. He preaches not like Paul-but like a Proctor.

Once more, then, we bid Mr. Shelley farewell. Let him come forth from the eternal city-where, we understand he has been sojourning in his strength, conquering and to conquer. Let his soul watch his soul, and listen to the voice of its own noble nature-and there is no doubt that the future will make amends for the past,

whatever its errors may have been-and that the Poet may yet be good, great, and happy.

[From the New Monthly Magazine.-Lond. May, 1820.] 4.-The Cenci: a tragedy, in five acts-by PERCY B. SHELLEY. 8vo. Italy. (London, 1819.)

WHATEVER may be the opinion respecting the poetical genius displayed in this work, there can be but one sentiment of wonder and disgust, in every honest heart, at the strange perversity of taste which selected its theme. It is the story of a wretch grown old in crime, whose passions are concentrated at last in quenchless hate towards his children, especially his innocent and lovely daughter, against whom he perpetrates the most fearful of outrages, which leads to his death by her contrivance, and her own execution for the almost blameless parricide. The narrative we believe" is extant in choice Italian," but this is no excuse for making its awful circumstances the groundwork of a tragedy.-The circumstance of a tale being true, does not always render it fit for the general ear. The exposure of a crime too often pollutes the very soul which shudders at its recital, and destroys that unconsciousness of ill which most safely preserves its sanctities. There can be little doubt that the horrible details of murder which are too minutely given in our public journals, lead men to dwell on horrors until they cease to petrify, and gradually prepare them for that which once they trembled to think on. "Direness familiar to their slaughterous thoughts cannot once start them." One suicide is usually followed by others, because men of distempered imaginations brood over the thoughts of the deed, until their diseased and fevered minds are ready to embrace it.-All know that, for many centuries, there was no punishment provided at Rome for parricide, and that not an instance occurred to make the people repent of the omission. And may it not be supposed that this absence of the crime was owing to the absence of the law-that the subject was thrown far back from the imagination-that the offence was impossible because it was believed so—and that the regarding it as out of all human calculation, gave to it a distant awfulness far more fearful than the severest of earthly penalties?-The ordinary wicked regard themselves as on a pinnacle of virtue, while they look into the fearful depth beneath them. The reader of this play, however intense his hatred of crime, feels in its perusal that the sting is taken from offences which usually chill the blood with horror, by the far removed atrocity which it discloses. The more ordinary vices of the hero become reliefs to us: his cruelties seem to

link him to humanity; and his murders are pillows on which the imagination reposes.--Sir Thomas Brown, in the last chapter of his Enquiries into Vulgar Errors, observes of such sins as want either name or precedent-" We desire no records of such enormities sins should be accounted new, that so they may be esteemed monstrous. The pens of men may sufficiently expatiate, without these singularities of villany; for as they increase the hatred of vice in some, so do they enlarge the theory of wickedness in all. And this is one thing that may make latter ages worse than the former; for the vicious examples of ages past, poison the curiosity of these present, affording a hint of sin unto seduceable spirits, and soliciting those unto the imitation of them, whose heads were never so perversely principled as to invent them.-In things of this nature, silence commendeth History; 'tis the veniable part of things lost, wherein there must never rise a Pancirollus, nor remain any register but that of Hell!"

If the story of the drama before us is unfit to be told as mere matter of historic truth, still further is it from being suited to the uses of poetry.-Mr. Shelley acknowledges that any thing like a 'dry exhibition of his tale on the stage would be insupportable,' and that the person who would treat such a subject must increase 'the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the 'pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these stu'pendous sufferings and crimes, may mitigate the pain of the con'templation of the moral deformity from which they spring.' But in the most prominent of their sufferings and crimes, there can be no poetry, nor has poetry the power to lessen the weight of superfluous misery they cast on the soul. Beauties may be thrown around them; but as they cannot mingle with their essence they will but increase their horrors; as flowers fantastically braided round a corpse, instead of lending any bloom to the cheek, render its lividness more sickening. In justice to Mr. Shelley we must observe that he has not been guilty of attempting to realize his own fancy. There is no attempt to lessen the horror of the crime, no endeavour to redeem its perpetrator by intellectual superiority, no thin veil thrown over the atrocities of his life. He stands, base as he is odious, and, as we have hinted already, is only thought of as a man, when he softens into a murderer. We are far from denying that there is great power in many parts of this shocking tragedy. Its author has at least shown himself capable of leaving these cold abstractions which he has usually chosen to embody, and of endowing human characters with life, sympathy and passion. With the exception of Cenci, who is half maniac and half fiend, his persons speak and act like creatures of flesh and blood-not like the a Who wrote of Inventions Lost-de Antiquis deperditis.