little coffin of a room at Shanklin is changed for a large room, where I can promenade at my pleasure-looks out on to a beautiful-blank side of a house. It is strange I should like it better than the view of the sea from our window at Shanklin. I began to hate the very posts there the voice of the old Lady over the way was getting a great Plague. The Fisherman's face never altered any more than our black tea-pot, the knob, however was knock'd off to my little relief. I am getting a great dislike of the picturesque, and can only relish it over again by seeing you enjoy it. One of the pleasantest things I have seen lately was at Cowes. The Regent in his Yatch 1 (I think they spell it) was anchored opposite-a beautiful vessel-and all the Yatchs and boats on the coast were passing and repassing it, and circuiting and tacking about it in every direction. I never beheld anything so silent, light and graceful. As we pass'd over to Southampton, there was nearly an accident. There came by a Boat, well mann'd, with two naval officers at the stern. Our Bow-lines took the top of their little mast and snapped it off close by the board. Had the mast been a little stouter, they would have been upset. In so trifling an event, I could not help admiring our seamen,—neither officer nor man in the whole Boat moved a muscle, they scarcely notic'd it even with words. Forgive me for this flint-worded Letter, and believe and see that I cannot think of you without some sort of energy though mal a propos. Even as I leave off, it seems to me that a few more moments' thought of you would uncrystallise and dissolve me. I must not give way to it—but turn to my writing again -if I fail, I shall die hard. O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy-I must forget them. Ever your affectionate KEATS. 1 This word is of course left as found in the original letter; an editor who would spell it yacht would be guilty of representing Keats as thinking what he did not think. 66 That seems to me a letter most characteristic of Keats, well worth preserving, and not of the purely personal character of most of the correspondence. The idea throughout is that the writer's heart, while it is occupied with the world of poetry, seems made of iron"; that the sentences of the letter he wrote while thus employed are like "strokes of a hammer"; that instead of writing soothing words, he is "engaged in a charge of cavalry"; and that all this hardness is due to his poetic preoccupations. That fancy of his is very characteristic of the depth of his poetic life. And still more the touching plea for what he calls his "flint-worded letter," namely, that it proves, at all events, that he cannot think of her to whom it is addressed "without some sort of energy,"—and the melting into genuine love in the last sentence, as his fancy conjures up once more her to whom he is writing, are curiously characteristic of a poet whose love of beauty was so strong, that it alone seemed to satisfy him like love of a person, and was his only equivalent for personal affection, and who evidently made even the lady of his choice jealous of her own beauty, since she seems to have feared, not perhaps untruly, that he loved her for her beauty, not for herself, and so fearing, was not able to elicit from Keats any positive contradiction. The little volume is, indeed, full of Keats. And yet I would rather that it had been buried in the oblivion to which assuredly he himself would have consigned it. SHELLEY AS PROPHET It is probably not fair to the Master of University College, Oxford, to accept the report in the Times of Thursday week as adequately representing what he said of the prophetic character of Shelley. I should be very sorry to deny that Shelley had a true discernment of the character of the sentiment which his own poetry did so much to mould and to inspire. There was plenty of true anticipation in him, if not of that which, in the higher sense, we are accustomed to call prophecy. His aspirations after universal beauty, his yearnings for diffused love and loveliness, his intolerance of a slow and patient providence, his eagerness to promote a rapture of humanity at large into a more vivid world, have unquestionably proved contagious in the highest degree. Vague as were his visions, no man has done more to thrill the world with the ardours of his own heart, with the insatiable cravings, and quick, fitful anguish of his own hopes and griefs. But I should decline entirely to declare with Dr. Bright that Shelley delivered either any affective rebuke to our pessimism, or any effective augury of good omen to the human race. If the noble concluding lines of "Prometheus Unbound" be relied on as proving that Shelley was really a prophet of the triumph of good over evil, I should cite the concluding lines of "" "Hellas -a later poem, and one that was not forced by the very nature of its subject to paint Shelley's conception of what such a triumph should be, if it ever came at all-to prove that the former passage was rather dramatic than prophetic, and that what Shelley really conceived as his own forecast of the future was something like an alternation of good and evil of which he did not venture to face the ultimate issue : Saturn and Love their long repose Shall burst, more bright and good Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers, Oh, cease! Must hate and death return? Cease! Must men kill and die? Cease! Drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last! That seems to me much the nearest approach Shelley ever made to expressing his own view of the future of our world. And clearly, he regarded that future as too full of bitterness to admit of anything like steady contemplation. His eye shrank from the vision, and his voice could only utter a musical wail of plaintive dread. Dr. Bright's conception of Shelley as prophesying "good things and not bad," as a prophet whom it is "cheerful" to encounter, seems to me exceedingly ill justified by anything which Shelley has written. Indeed, even at the close of "Prometheus Unbound," there is the same indication of a belief in the Eternal alternation of evil and good; though, as Shelley was writing expressly on the unbinding of the divine friend of man, he is more or less compelled to let the pean of triumph rise highest and be heard last in the scale : Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance, Mother of many acts and hours, should free The serpent that would clasp her with his length, Moreover, Shelley took care, in the notes with which he accompanied "Hellas," his latest considerable work, to let the world know distinctly not only what he thought of the superiority of "Saturn and Love" the deities who represented "the imaginary state of innocence and happiness," as he called it, which preceded Christianity-to Christ, but of the superiority of Christ himself to the Power which sent Him into the world. Shelley was no prophet who augured the victory of Christ from the infinite power of Him who so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son that the world through Him might be saved. On the contrary, he affixed this remarkable note to the verses in which he described the temporary return of a golden age before that fatal swinging-back of the pendulum which he saw in vision, and which made him cry out in anguish : "Oh, cease! must hate and death return?" Here is Shelley's own comment on his last poetic prophecy, a prophecy which certainly does not seem to me to |