compared with the natural beauty of simple transparency, which has exerted no such moulding power. Shelley had no such feeling. He shrank from the resisting medium as intrinsically ugly, because it resisted the sunshine of beauty; and his only idea was to refine away the coarse material of earth until the sunshine remained pure and undiluted. His adoration is all for the ease and richness and warmth of overflowing, passionate, lavish beauty. Asia, in his Prometheus Unbound, is his true goddess, and he paints her thus:

"Life of Life! thy lips enkindle

With their love the breath between them;
And thy smiles before they dwindle

Make the cold air fire; then screen them

In those looks, where whoso gazes

Faints, entangled in their mazes.

Child of Light! thy lips are burning

Through the vest which seems to hide them,

As the radiant lines of morning

Through the clouds ere they divide them;

And this atmosphere divinest

Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest.

Fair are others; none beholds thee,

But thy voice sounds low and tender,

Like the fairest, for it folds thee

From the sight, that liquid splendour;
And all feel, yet see thee never,

As I feel now, lost for ever!

Lamp of earth! where'er thou movest,

Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,

And the souls of whom thou lovest

Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail as I am failing,

Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing."

Nothing could express better the ideal of melting beauty; the beauty which, like a rich odour, makes us "faint," according to Shelley's own favourite expression.

Further again, as we have said, Shelley's intellect and imagination were not of a sort to handle and master a complex whole. There was no grip in them. Infinitely subtle they were; and if they had had more volition, they might perhaps have been less subtle; but of volition they were almost destitute. His imagination was of one dimension only, a point of moving fire generating myriads of beautiful shapes, but never illuminating any thing beyond the single series of connected positions which the spark traversed between the moment of kindling and the moment of extinction. Hence the far greater perfection of his shorter lyrics, and the superiority of the Cenci,

which is constituted by one single thrill of preternatural horror, to any other of his longer poems. He never holds up either a subject or a character steadily before his mind to examine it in all its parts; even the Cenci is a passion, not a drama,-the silver gleam of a winter torrent down a terrific precipice, leaving a shudder behind, and no more.

Thus Shelley's intellectual, moral, and emotional nature alike made him a pure idealist. There was no moulding, no subduing, no conquering element in the Beauty he worshipped. It conquered by passive fascination alone, not by any inherent dominating force. There was no inherent strength in his conception of beauty. He abstracted it from the world, instead of impressing or imposing it on it. His intellect had no grapplingirons wherewith to cling to the existing order of things till he had exhausted its possibilities; his conscience showed the finest feminine qualities and faithfulness in the sense of mere endurance, but recoiled abruptly from all aggressive exploits against the coarse jumbled evils of the world; his affections were not dumb conservative things, which fastened on the forms consccrated by time and usage, but swift gleams of chameleon-like rapture. His creed on this head he has versified for us, though he was perhaps higher than his creed. The passage throws a considerable light on his whole cast of intellect:

"I never was attached to that great sect

Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion; though it is the code

Of modern morals, and the beaten road

Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away;
Love is like understanding, that grows bright
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human fantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sunlike arrow
Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow

The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity."

This is the natural creed of an inconstant imagination.

G

Rapid change, strung together only by the continuity of a flash of feeling, being thus the law of Shelley's imagination, all his longer poems, except the Cenci, are very defective in unity. Even Adonais is only a shimmer of beautiful regret, full of arbitrary though harmonious and delicate fancies; while the Witch of Atlas gauges for us the spontaneous tendencies of Shelley's volatile and inconstant imagination, when it happened to be entirely free from the spell of any strong desire, and shows us how loose was the texture of his genius when not dominated by such feelings. No other poet could make us take the slightest interest in the subject. The witch is the impersonation of Shelley's own fancy-free imagination, and is said to be the spirit of love, but exhibits it only in the shape of that pale gentleness of disposition which Shelley so often confounded with love. She, like the poet himself, has storehouses of all essences of beauty, "sounds of air," "folded in cells of crystal silence:"

"Such as we hear in youth, and think the feeling
Will never die; yet, ere we are aware,
The feeling and the sound are fled and gone,
And the regret they leave remains alone."

And then, too, she has essences of dreams, "swift, sweet, and
quaint," each "in his thin sheath like a chrysalis ;" and "odours
in a kind of aviary" which are commissioned to stir sweet thoughts
or sad in destined minds; and even "liquors clear and sweet,"
a sort of essence of healing influences, the agreeable quintessence
of a celestial apothecary's shop, without any of the unpleasant
terrestrial alloys,-in fact, all the beauties which Shelley had
distilled in thought out of this miscellaneous world;—and won-
derful atoms of detailed beauty they are, most exquisitely com-
bining thoughts with perceptions, but wanting as a whole just
in the very thing in which Shelley's imagination was wanting,-
connecting purpose or subduing comprehensiveness. The Witch
does not sleep at night, but lies in trance, "with open eyes,
closed feet, and folded palm," in the fountain, watching the
constellations reel and dance over her; or, in winter, in a well
of crimson fire, watching the flakes of snow melt as they touch
it. She moulds a sexless companion out of snow and fire "tem-
pered by love," and with it voyages about, "circling the image
of a shooting star," and otherwise investigating all the subtle
dreams of Shelley's fancy. But her most characteristic occupation
is the one Shelley assigns her in human affairs: here she would
defeat all the crooked purposes of priests and hypocrites, but
without changing the heart of deceit; she would gratify lovers'
passions, and save them from the results; in short, she would
remove all the natural obstructions to the sweeter desires of

human life, defeat the unnatural vices, and smooth the way to a placid adjustment of wants and pleasures. This is an exact reflection of the spontaneous reverie of Shelley's imagination when not illuminated by some glowing flash of feeling. It busied itself with fusing together mental and sensuous impressions into symbols of rare beauty; in shaking them up in the kaleidoscope of his delicate fancy; or in using them more thoughtfully to construct a world from which all wrong and violence should be eliminated; a thin world of distilled loveliness and spontaneous instinct, but containing nothing that could be called the strength of divine love, a world in which evil should be foiled or evaporated rather than conquered.

This interlunar sphere, in which Shelley places the activity of his Witch of Atlas, is, we believe, the region with which his own imagination was most familiar,-the sphere of ideal beauty lying midway between Divine Power and human life. His mysticism arises quite as much from his refusal to acknowledge the world beyond, as from his reluctance to meddle with the coarse details on this side of his appropriate world. His Witch of Atlas puts forth nothing which can be called constraining power at all,she only removes friction; and it was a characteristic of Shelley's mind that he could scarcely conceive either Power or Government, properly so called, except as pure evil and tyranny. This alone gives much of the apparent mysticism both to his political and his religious poems. It is obvious, we suppose, that politics involve a faith in government, religion a faith in the divine Will. Shelley had no such faith. He believed rather in the abolition of government than in government; in the divinity of love perhaps, but love of the thinnest naturalistic type, certainly not in the love of infinite power. Hence there are no poems that seem more hazy to our own age than his political and religious dreams. In both he is striving to delineate something to which beneficent power is essential, and he does it by an elision of the very idea. He paints a mere shadow of Influence, a white symbol of Acquiescence, thinner and less real than the Witch of Atlas herself, and puts the reins of this headstrong universe into its hands. In his political poems, indeed, Shelley scarcely takes the trouble to sketch even a shadow of government, while he carefully erases all the distinctive features which give force and reality to the meaning of the word: "The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains, Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless," Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself, just, gentle, wise."

All that is wanted to his imagination is the rejection of the

tyrannical yoke, not the imposition of a just one. Man would be greater if" sceptreless, free, equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless," than under the laws which are the growth of history, and which recognise the actual distinctions between nation and nation. From the sceptre on the one hand, from the vulgar details of national prejudice and peculiarities on the other, his ideal mind alike recoiled. When Shelley was writing his poem of Hellas, Trelawny insisted on taking him to see actual Greeks on board the ships at Leghorn, that he might better know what he was writing of. They found the Greek crews "squatting about the decks in small knots, shrieking, gesticulating, smoking, eating, and gambling, like savages.' Does this realise your idea of Hellenism, Shelley?' I said. No; but it does of Hell,' he replied." The skipper was opposed to the Greek revolution because it "interrupted trade." "Come away," said Shelley; "there is not a drop of the old Hellenic blood here. These are not the men to rekindle the ancient Greek fire; their souls are extinguished by traffic and superstition. Come away; I had rather not have any more of my hopes and illusions mocked by sad realities." This is a striking picture of the recoil of Shelley's mind from the actual men concerning whose political state he dreamed and poetised.

And of course he neglected to notice not only the vices and faults which render some government necessary by way of remedy, but also many virtues and capacities for a life in common, which render all such government valuable as a concentration of the energies of a united race. His abstract man might live perhaps "sceptreless, tribeless, and nationless;" but with the actual qualities shared by the tribe and the nation the value of the sceptre begins. We can easily understand, therefore, the feeling which Shelley is said to have expressed to Mr. Hogg: "With how unconquerable an aversion do I shrink from political articles in newspapers and reviews! I have heard people talk politics by the hour, and how I hated it and them! I went with my father several times to the House of Commons, and what creatures did I see there! what faces! what an expression of countenance! what wretched beings!" Here he raised his voice to a painful pitch with fervid dislike. "Good God! what men did we meet about the House, in the lobbies and passages! and my father was so civil to all of them -to animals that I regarded with unmitigated disgust!" Of course he did: here he found the stringy fibre of real politics,power in its coarse form, wielding vulgar motives and machinery, -the gristle of government. Shelley had no belief in such government. He wanted to see man "tribeless and nationless," following gentle instincts without any friction or any yoke.