Alaster is a poem beautifully conceived, and beautifully executed. Of Shelley's poems, it alone is perfect in its truth-of Shelley's poems, it alone is free from the disturbing influences of the war with society in which he had so early and so madly engaged. We have said that in all Shelley's poems his study of Southey's works is manifested. In all Shelley's poems there is evidence of original genius of the very highest order; but the early works of a poet cannot but exhibit the food on which his spirit feeds. Shelley had not, at any period of his life, studied largely our earlier writers; and at the time Queen Mab and Alaster were written we think it improbable that he had read any English poetry of an earlier date than that of the great poets of his own time. Wordsworth's poem of Tintern Abbey, and the passage in Joan of Arc which describes the inspiration of the heroine, seem to have possessed his imagination when "Alaster" was written. Such imitation as this implies is for the most part unconscious, and only analogous to a child expressing its own thoughts and feelings in its parents' language.

claim his children that were under her father's | Cricklade. 'Alaster' was composed on his recare. Whenever this incident is alluded to, the turn." writers of Shelley's life feel it not unbecoming to upbraid Lord Eldon for his conduct, in what is called depriving Shelley of his children. The language is probably thoughtlessly used, but it suggests an absolutely false state of facts. One of the children was born after the separation, and neither of them had ever been under Shelley's exclusive care. When the separation took place, his daughter and the child then born were left with her father. Shelley never saw them afterwards. We cannot think it possible that any one who ever sat in the chancellor's seat in England could have, on the facts stated, come to any other conclusion than that which was forced on Lord Eldon, in the case of a man who had printed and circulated works his friends stupidly seem to rely on the fact, that they were not, in the booksellers' sense of the word, published works—in which he denied the existence of a God, and wi.o gave the court no reason to think he had changed his opinion. To such a man the education of children could not and ought not to have been entrusted-and we confess that our sympathies are altogether with the unfortunate grandfather of the children who had" Alaster" represents a youth of uncorrupted feelalready lost his daughter, and who had bitter rea- ings and adventurous genius-we use Shelley's son to judge of Shelley's principles by the fruit language-drinking deep of the fountains of knowlwhich he had seen them bear. Of Shelley him- edge, and yet insatiate. While his desires point self it is impossible to think with other than feel- to the external universe, he is tranquil and joyous; ings of tenderness; but the question for Lord El- but the period arrives when this ceases to suffice. don was not how Shelley's opinions originated— His mind is at length suddenly awakened, and and what the virtues of the individual were, which thirsts for an intelligence similar to itself. He may perhaps have been in some views of the sub-images to himself the being whom he loves." He ject evidenced by the sort of persecution he underwent. We think Lord Eldon was throughout right in his judgment on this case, and his language, as given in Jacob's Law Reports, is calm and forbearing. Some very fierce verses of Shelley's against Lord Eldon, are preserved by Mrs. Shelley, and Medwin interprets-we think wrongly some verses in an allegorical poem, called Epipsychidion, into an attack on his first wife.

In 1816, Shelley married again. The restlessness of mere boyhood had ceased. His pecuniary circumstances had greatly improved. This alone would be likely to render his second marriage happy. His wife, herself a woman of great genius, and who regarded Shelley with almost idolatrous veneration, has preserved a perfect record of his atter life. It was passed, for the first two or hree years of their union, between visits to the continent and occasional residences in England, often in the neighborhood of the Thames.

66

is the creature of imagination, and seeks to unite in one object all that he can picture to his mind of good, or pure, or true; he seeks that which must end in disappointment. "Blasted by disappointment, he descends into an untimely grave.”

66

The poet's self-centred seclusion is avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin ;" and hence the name of the poem -the word "Alaster" signifying the avenger of crime, and the criminal. Both uses of the word seem present to Shelley's mind in a case where the crime was that of too intense indulgence of imagination, and where the punishment is a vain search in the world of actual life for an ideal which is the creation of the mind itself, and which could not, under any conceivable conditions, be realized. Shelley wrote the poem in the belief that he was dying.

Abscesses had formed on his lungs, and recovery seemed to his physicians impossible. Physical suffering is the hot-bed of genius; and the strange circumstances of his life were calculated to make Shelley look inward on his own nature and being. The poem is one of touching solemnity. In the language there is not, as far as we know, a strain of melody sustained throughout at the same elevation.

"As soon as the peace of 1814 had opened the continent," says Mrs. Shelley, "he went abroad. He visited some of the more magnificent scenes of Switzerland, and returned to England from Lucerne by the Reuss and the Rhine. This river navigation enchanted him. In his favorite poem of Thalaba his imagination had been delighted by such a voyage. The summer of 1815 was passed, after a visit to Devonshire, on the borders of Windsor hero, a poet, leaves, Forest. He visited the source of the Thames, making a voyage in a wherry from Windsor to

The tale is the simplest in the world.

"When early youth has pass d, His cold fireside and alienated home,"

The

and wanders over the world.

He visits the ruins | Encountering on some dizzy precipice

"He dreamed a veiled maid
Sate near him, talking in low, solemn tones.
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought.
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,
And lofty hopes of divine liberty

(Thoughts the most dear to him) and poesy-
Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood

Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame
A permeating fire; wild numbers then

She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs
Subdued by its own pathos; her fair hands
Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp
Strange symphony:

Night

Involved and swallowed up the vision: sleep,
Like a dark flood suspended in its course,
Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain."

Nothing can be finer than the passage that follows:

"Roused by the shock, he started from his trance:
The cold white light of morning, the blue moon
Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,
The distinct valley, and the vacant wood,
Stood round him where he stood. Whither have
fled

The hues of heaven that canopied his bower
Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his

sleep,

The mystery and the majesty of earth,
The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes
Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly

As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven.
The spirit of sweet human love has such
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues,
Beyond the realm of dreams, that fleeting shade:
He overleaps the bounds!-

Lost, lost, forever lost,
In the wide, pathless desert of dim sleep,
That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death
Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,
O Sleep?"

"While daylight held
The sky, the poet kept mute conference
With his still soul. At night the passion came
Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream,
And shook him from his rest, and led him forth
Into the darkness. As an eagle, grasped
In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast
Burn with the poison, and precipitates,
Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and
cloud,

Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight
O'er the wide aery wilderness: thus driven
By the bright shadows of that lovely dream,
He fled."

That spectral form, deemed that the spirit of wind
With lightening eyes, and eager breath, and feet
In his career:
Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused
The infant would conceal

His troubled visage in his mother's robe,
In terror at the glare of those wild eyes,
To remember their strange light in many a dream
Of after times; but youthful maidens, taught
By nature, would interpret half the woe
That wasted him, would call him with false names,
Brother, and friend, would press his pallid hand
At parting, and watch, dim through tears, the path
Of his departure from their father's door."

"A strong impulse urged

His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there
Beside a sluggish stream, among the reeds.
It rose as he approached, and with strong wings
Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course
High over the immeasurable main.

His eyes pursued its flight!- Thou hast a home,
Beautiful bird-thou voyagest to thine home,
Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck
With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes
Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy!'

Startled by his own thoughts, he looked around—
There was no fair fiend near him, not a sight
Or sound of awe, but in his own deep mind."

The mystery of the poem deepens. A little shallop, floating near the shore, catches his eve"It had been long abandoned, for its sides

Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints
Swayed with the undulation of the tide.
A restless impulse urged him to embark,
And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste,
For well he knew that mighty shadow loves
The slimy caverns of the populous deep."

His voyage is described, and finally his death. The poem is in form narrative, but, throughout, the language is steeped in the deepest hues of passion, and from it might be augured with certainty the future great dramatic poet. The ro mance of the subject justifies and almost demands a pomp of words which would be out of place in the more sober scenes in which Wordsworth has placed the interlocutors in the Excursion. We are far from regarding Shelley as in any mental power inferior to Southey, but we can everywhere trace the influence of the elder poet's mind. We have alluded to Joan of Arc and Thalaba, and in the passages which we have just quoted from Alaster, is it possible to avoid remembering the dream by which Roderic is summoned to his appointed task, and the effect of his appearance among those engaged in the business of ordinary life?

"Through the streets he went
With haggard mien and countenance, like one
Crazed and bewildered. All who met him turned
And wondered as he past. One stopt him short,

His wanderings are described, and then follows Put alms into his hand, and then desired,

In broken Gothic speech, the moon-struck man
To bless him.

The Mussulman
Shrunk at the ghastly sight, and magnified
The name of Allah, as he hastened on.
A Christian woman spinning at the door

Beheld him, and with sudden pity touched
She laid her spindle by," &c.-Southey's Roderic.

same,

|parents or his masters. He seems to have been left to himself almost entirely, and to have judged by the evils which he everywhere saw in the The composition of the two passages is the institutions of society, many of which seemed to although the probability is, that Shelley had exist in direct counteraction of their original purno distinct recollection of the passage he was poses. The astonishing thing in Shelley is, that imitating. Alaster is in all respects superior to in spite of great neglect in his instructors-in spite Queen Mab, Shelley's earliest poem. The vicious of a sort of self-education conducted on the princistructure of society is the subject of Queen Mab-ple, that everything his masters thought to teach and all its evils are presented to the imagination him was worthless-in spite of his early studies as if they could be at once removed by strong of all circulating library nonsense-in spite of his exertion of the will. It is but for each individual own additions to its store-in spite of his extreme to will it war, marriage, religion, and all the disputatiousness-in spite of boyish vanity, there miseries that disquiet life, will at once cease. can be no doubt that there are, through his whole Shelley's self-deception arises from his contem- short life, decided improvement—an increasing plating man's nature as it is in itself, as it existed disposition towards a juster appreciation of the in Paradise anterior to the existence of society—views of other men—a benevolence that led him, and from this drawing inferences that can have no not alone in his writings to inculcate, but in his application to the artificial state of existence which practice to realize, the lesson of never returning evil we, and our parents, and our children, are born for evil. We do not think that there is reason to into. Absolute, unmodified rights there are none; say, as has been sometimes said, that his views and of the necessary modifications it is not possible had changed with respect to Christianity; on this that a boy of eighteen should have experience subject—and not on this subject alone—we really enough of life to form any right estimate. Shel- think there was in his mind a taint of insanity. ley is almost inspired when he holds communion The hatred, the malignity of feeling with which with his own mind alone and reveals its move- Christianity is treated by this preacher of unlimited ments. His fantasies, when they would stretch at toleration, is we think to be accounted for by nothall beyond that which ought to have been "the ing else. His infidelity is something not unlike haunt and main region of his song," are mere Newman's, and arising very much in the same dreams, and ought to be remembered or forgotten way. He excludes the books in which the docas such. As to religion, perhaps the most valua- trines of Christianity are contained, as any part of ble lesson that can be learned from Shelley's poe- the evidence which is to show what Christianity is, try is, that man cannot exist without one. Keats and assumes the history of a world, warring with dreamed out a sort of heathen mythology for him- every one of its doctrines, to be the history of self, in which he seems to have had a kind of Christianity. Nothing can be more offensive than belief;-and Shelley in his Queen Mab-a poem the tone in which, to speak of no higher considerin which the existence of a Creator of the world is ations, good taste is violated by the introduction denied speaks of a spirit of the universe, and a of sacred names, for the purpose of increasing the coëternal fairy of the earth. Verily, this atheism effect of some of the scenes in his poems. Prois a strange pretence. It is at once lost in pan-methus is made, in one passage, to witness in vision theism or polytheism; indeed, nothing but the the stupendous mystery of our Lord's crucifixion, transitoriness of words, and the impossibility of and to sympathize with the sufferer. We feel this permanently uniting by such ties the combinations sort of patronage more offensive-absolutely more of thought in which Shelley almost revelled, ena- offensive than the passages in Queen Mab, in which bled him to distinguish his state of mind from that the language is of unmitigated scorn; yet it would of a pagan, dreaming of Apollo, and the Hours, be unfair not to acknowledge that it shows an and the Graces. In Shelley's case "the figures improved state of feeling on the subject in Shelquaint and sweet," are "all made out of the car- ley's mind. In the Revolt of Islam, too, we are ver's brain ;" but they are, as in the case of the glad to state our entire belief in Shelley's stateidolatries of old, a sort of fanciful religion, evidenc-ment, that "the erroneous and degrading idea, ing the yearnings of the human mind for some-which men have conceived of a Supreme Being is thing beyond itself, which it is unable to supply-spoken against, but not the Supreme Being himand which it seeks to create for itself by one fic- self." This is different-essentially differenttion or another. Shelley was a child, with a from the temper in which Queen Mab is written, child's simplicity and goodness; but a child's and in which he himself indulges in the violent entire inexperience; of the world within his own passions which he imputes to others. The "Rebosom none could be more entirely conscious. volt of Islam," though written a few years after There he saw clearly-as clearly as natural reason "Alaster," was written in the same feeling of -"The light that lighteneth every man that approaching death, and in the hope-nay rather comes into the world," enabled him. It seems with the determination-of leaving a record of strange how a boy educated in a Christian country himself. It contains many passages of great should have been left so entirely to himself on sub-beauty, but is deformed-we speak of it as a poem jects of religion; for his education in which, no-by much political disquisition, which has neither adequate provision seems to have been made by his the calmness of philosophy, nor the less sober

To-morrow, before dawn,
Cenci will take us to that lonely rock,
Petrella, in the Apulian Apennines
-If he arrive there.

Beatrice.

charm of poetry. It was written in the summer The others are, in comparison with it, scarcely months of 1817, when he lived at Marlow; "in more than the exercises of a boy, disciplining himhis boat as it floated under the beech groves of self for the tasks of an after period of life. In Bisham, or during wanderings in the neighboring modern poetry there is nothing equal to the pascountry, which is distinguished for peculiar sage describing the scene of the proposed murder beauty." Marlow was then inhabited by a very shall we not say execution-of the father. poor population-the women lacemakers. "The "Lucretia. poor laws," says Mrs. Shelley, "ground to the dust, not only the paupers, but those who had risen just above that state, and were obliged to pay poor-rates."-Shelley was generous, and did what he could to relieve the distress. Howitt went a year or two ago to Marlow, to look after such recollections or traditions as might remain of the poet. One man remembered his boat, on the stern of which was painted its name-"The Vaga,' and that some Marlow wag had added the letters bond. This he told exultingly—and this seemed to end the record. At last an obscure whisper ran among the circle that gathered round the inquisitorial quaker, of one man who did remember him. He was sent for, and he came. Howitt sat silent, listening till the squire-for so the man in black seemed to be-might deign to speak. "Art thou the squire? Or parson of the parish? Or the attorney?"

was the thought of the wondering quaker, as he gazed on the tall gaunt figure. Can he be the executor? was the thought of the man in black, who at last revealed the secret of his recollection, and said he had good cause to remember Mr. Shelley. He was a very good man. When they left Marlow they directed all their bills to be sent in— all that were sent in were paid. His-he was a chandler was neglected to be sent and was not paid. Howitt rushed to his carriage, indignant at the baseness of mankind, indignant too at the sad fact that the house once occupied by Shelley is now a pot-house!

It is impossible for us, within the limits to which we must confine ourselves, to speak as we could wish of Shelley's mastery over language-which was gradually becoming perfect. The exceeding subtlety of his thoughts was such as to demand every aid that words could give, and the result was a power of language such as no English poet has before attained. This, had Shelley lived, would probably have made him our greatest poet, for there is no one of his poems that gives in any degree an adequate measure of his intellectual

power.

We feel of him as if he had created a language, in which he did not live long enough to have written anything. He died while his best powers were yet immature. The effect of such poems as he did write was diminished by his lavish expenditure of this rich and overflowing language, which goes beyond the thought, and instead of expressing conceals it or magnifies it into undue

He must not arrive.
Orsino.

Will it be dark before you reach the tower?
Lucretia.

The sun will scarce be set.

Beatrice.

But I remember,

Two miles on this side of the fort, the road
Crosses a deep ravine-'t is rough and narrow,
And winds with short turns down the precipice;
And in its depth there is a mighty rock,
Which has, from unimaginable years,
Sustained itself with terror and with toil
Over a gulf, and with the agony

With which it clings, seems slowly coming down,
Even as a wretched soul, hour after hour,
Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging leans;
And leaning makes more dark the dread abyss
In which it fears to fall. Beneath this crag,
Huge as despair, as if in weariness,
The melancholy mountain yawns-below
You hear, but see not, an impetuous torrent
Raging among the caverns, and a bridge
Crosses the chasm.

What sound is that?

Lucretia.

Hark! No, it cannot be a servant's step,
It must be Cenci.

Beatrice.

That step we hear approach must never pass
The bridge of which we spoke."

In this passage the description of the rock overhanging the precipice, and the simile forced as it circumstances in which she is compelled to think were on the imagination of the speaker, by the of her father's guilt, is absolutely the finest thing

we have ever read. In the Prometheus there is a
passage of great power, which in the same manner
mouth of Asia, the devoted lover of Prometheus :-
is justified by the way in which it is put into the

"Hark! the rushing snow!
The sun-awakened avalanche-whose mass,
Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there,
Flake after flake-in heaven-defying minds
As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round,
Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now!"

pomp. Each successive work exhibited increased power of condensation-and language, by doing Whatever the merit of the passage may be, no more than its proper business, had a thousand- considered as descriptive, its true value is of fold more power. Of this the Cenci is a remark- another kind. That every object in nature should able instance. It is Shelley's greatest poem. suggest Prometheus to his bride-that his defiance