Islam,

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Light, a common joy to all,

Thou beholdest these my wrongs!” Shelley was, and had a right to be, a daring genius. He had the threefold right of power, despair, and approaching death. He felt himself strong; he had been driven desperate; and he knew that his time was short. Hence, as a poet, he aimed at the boldest and greatest things. He must leap into death's arms from the loftiest pinnacle possible. But all his genius, determination, and feeling of having no time to lose, were counteracted in their efforts by a certain morbid weakness, which was partly the result of bodily suffering, and partly of the insulated position into which his melancholy creed had thrown him. He was a hero in a deep decline. Tall, swift, and subtle, he wanted body, sinews, and blood. His genius resembled a fine voice cracked. The only thoroughly

manly and powerful things he has written, are some parts of the “Revolt of

" the “ Cenci as a whole, and the commencement and one or two passages throughout the “Prometheus.” The rest of his writings—even when beautiful, as they generally are, and sincere, as they are always—are more or less fantastical and diseased. The “Cenci” itself, the most calm and artistic of his works, could never have been selected as a subject by a healthy or perfectly sane mind.

'Prometheus Unbound” is the most ambitious of his poems.

But it was written too fast. It was written, too, in a state of over-excitement, produced by the intoxication of an Italian spring, operating upon a morbid system, and causing it to flush over with hectic and half-delirious joy. Above all, it was written twenty years too soon, ere his views had consolidated, and ere his thought and language were cast in their final mould. Hence, on the whole, it is a strong and beautiful disease. Its language is loose and luxuriant as a “Moenad's hair;” its imagery is wilder and less felicitous than in some of his other

me of his other poems. The thought is frequently drowned in a diarrhea of words; its dialogue is heavy and prolix; and its lyrics have more flow of sound, than beauty of image or depth of sentiment;

it is a false gallop, rather than a great kindling race. Compared with the “Prometheus” of Æschylus, Shelley's

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poem is wordy and diffuse; lacks unity and simplicity; above all, lacks whatever human interest is in the Grecian work. Nor has it the massive strength, the piled-up gold and gems, the barbaric but kingly magnificence of Keats' Hyperion.

Beauties, of course, of a rare order it possesses. The opening speech of Prometheus—his conversation with the Earth—the picture of the Hours-one or two of the choruses--and, above all, the description of the effects of the “many-folded shell,” in regenerating the world, are worthy of any poet or pen; and the whole, in its wasted strength, mixed with beautiful weakness, resembling a forest struck with premature autumn, fills us with deep regrets that his life had not been spared. Had he, twenty years later, a healthier, happier, and better man, “ clothed, and in his right mind," approached the sublime subject of the "Prometheus," no poet, save Milton and Keats, was ever likely to have so fully completed the Æschylean design. The last act of this drama is to us a mere dance of dark

It has all the sound and semblance of eloquent, musical, and glorying nonsense. But, apart from the mystic meanings deposited in its lyrics, Shelley's great object in this play, as in his “Queen Mab” and “Revolt of Islam,” is to predict the total extinction of evil, through the progress and perfectionment of the human race. Man is to grow into the God of the world. We are of this opinion, too, provided the necessity of divine sunshine and showers to consummate this growth be conceded. But Shelley's theory seems very hopeless. We may leave it to the scorching sarcasm, invective, and argument of Foster, in his “ Essay on the Term Romantic. The Ethiop is to

' wash himself white; the leper is to bathe away his leprosy in Abana and Pharpar, not in Jordan! We will believe it, as soon as we are convinced that human philosophy has of itself made any human being happy, and that there is not something in man requiring both a fiercer cautery and a nobler balm to cure. “ The nature of man still casts ominous conjecture on the whole success. Till that be

' changed, extended plans of human improvement, laws,

ness.

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a

man.

new institutions, and systems of education, are only what may be called the sublime mechanics of depravity. And what, we may add, can change that, short of an omnipotent fiat as distinct as that which at first spake darkness into light-chaos into a world? Of lyrics, and dramas, and poetic dreams, and philosophic theories, we have had enough; what we want is, the one master-word of Him who “spake with authority, and not as the scribes.”

The great Promethean rock shall be visited by poet for poetic treatment no more again for ever.

It is henceforth à “rock in the wilderness," smitten not into water, but into eternal sterility. But, although no poet shall ever seek in it the materials of another lofty song, yet its memory shall continue dear to all lovers of genius and

Many a traveller, looking northward from the banks of the Kur, or southward from the sandy plains of Russia, to the snowy peaks of the Caucasus, shall think of Prometheus, and try to shape out his writhing figure upon the storm-beaten cliffs. Every admirer of Grecian or of British genius shall turn aside, and see the spectacle of tortured worth, crushed dignity, and vicarious valour, exhibited with such wonderful force and verisimilitude by Æschylus and his follower.

And those who see, or think they see, in the story of this sublime, forsaken, and tormented Titan—the virtuous, the benevolent, the friend of man- -a faint shadow of the real tragedy of the cross, where the God-Man was “nailed,” as Prometheus is said to have been, was exposed to public ignominy, had his heart torn by the vulture of a world's substitutionary anguish, and at last, at the crisis of his agony, and while earth, and hell, and heaven were all darkening around him, cried out, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” (a fearful question, where you dare not lay the emphasis on any one, but must on all the words), cannot but feel more tender and awful emotions as they contemplate this outlying and unacknowledged type of the Crucified, suspended among the crags of the Caucasian wilderness.

SHAKSPERE-A LECTURE.* If a clergyman, thirty years ago, had announced a lecture on Shakspere, he might, as a postscript, have announced the resignation of his charge, if not the abandonment of his office. Times are now changed, and men are changed along with them. The late Dr Hamilton of Leeds, one of the most pious and learned clergymen in England, has left, in his “Nugæ Literariæ," a genial paper on Shakspere, and was never, so far as I know, challenged thereanent. And if

you

ask me one reason of this curious change, I answer, it is the long-continued presence of the spirit of Shakspere, in all its geniality, breadth, and power, in the midst of our society and literature. He is us like an unseen ghost, colouring our language, controlling our impressions, if not our thoughts, swaying our imaginations, sweetening our tempers, refining our tastes, purifying our manners, and effecting all this by the simple magic of his genius, and through a medium ---that of dramatic writing and representation-originally the humblest, and not yet the highest, form in which poetry and passion have chosen to exhibit themselves. Waiving, at present, the consideration of Shakspere in his form—the dramatist, let us look at him now in his essence—the poet. But, first, does any one ask, What is a poet? What is the ideal of the somewhat indefinite, but large and swelling term-poet? I answer, the greatest poet is the man who most roundly, clearly, easily, and strikingly, reflects, represents, and reproduces, in an imaginative form, his own sight or observation, his own heart or feeling, his own history or experience, his own memory or knowledge, his own imagination or dream-sight, heart, history, memory, and imagination, which, so far as they are faithfully represented from his consciousness, do also reflect the consciousness of general humanity. The poet is more a mirror than a maker; he may, indeed, unite with his reflective power others, such as that of forming, infusing into his song, and thereby glorifying a particular creed or scheme of speculation; but, just as surely as a rainbow, rising between two opposing countries or armies, is but a feeble bulwark, so, the real power of poetry is, not in conserving, nor in resisting, nor in supporting, nor in destroying, but in meekly and fully reflecting, and yet recreating and beautifying all things. Poetry, said Aristotle, is imitation; this celebrated aphorism is only true in one acceptation. If it mean that poetry is in the first instance prompted by a conscious imitation of the beautiful, which gradually blossoms into the higher shape of unconscious resemblance, we demur. But if by imitation is meant the process by which love for the beautiful in art or nature, at first silent and despairing, as the child's affection for the star, strengthens, and strengthens still, till the admired quality is transfused into the very being of the admirer, who then pours it back in eloquence or in song, so sweetly and melodiously, that it seems to be flowing from an original fountain in his own breast; if this be the meaning of the sage when he says that poetry is imitation, he is unquestionably right. Poetry is just the saying Amen, with a full heart and a clear voice, to the varied symphonies of nature, as they echo through the vaulted and solemn aisles of the poet's own soul.

It follows, from this notion of poetry, that in it there is no such thing as absolute origination or creation; its Belight simply evolves the element which already has existed amidst the darkness—it does not call it into existence. It follows, again, that the grand distinction between philosophy and poetry is, that while the former tries to trace things to their causes, and to see them as a great naked abstract scheme, poetry catches them as they are, in the concrete, and with all their verdure and flush about them; for even philosophical truths, ere poetry will reflect them, must be personified into life, and thus fitted to stand before her mirror. The ocean does not act as a prism to the sun -does not divide and analyse his light—but simply shows him as he appears to her in the full crown-royal of his