there are things in it lovely as heart can worship; and the author showed himself able to draw both men and women, whose names would have been "familiar in our mouths as household words.' The utmost might of gentleness, and of the sweet habitudes of domestic affection, was never more balmily impressed through the tears of the reader, than in the unique and divine close of that dreadful tragedy. Its loveliness, being that of the highest reason, is superior to the madness of all the crime that has preceded it, and leaves nature in a state of reconcilement with her ordinary course. The daughter, who is going forth with her mother to execution, utters these final words : Give yourself no unnecessary pain, My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, mother, tie In any simple knot. Ay, that does well; And yours, I see is coming down. How often We are quite ready, Well,-'t is very well. The force of simplicity and moral sweetness cannot go further than this. But in general, if Coleridge is the sweetest of our poets, Shelley is at once the most ethereal and most gorgeous; the one who has clothed his thoughts in draperies of the most evanescent and most magnificent words and imagery. Not Milton himself is more learned in Grecisms, or nicer in etymological propriety; and nobody, throughout, has a style so Orphic and primæval. His poetry is as full of mountains, seas, and skies, of light, and darkness, and the seasons, and all the elements of our being, as if Nature herself had written it, with the creation and its hopes newly cast around her; not, it must be confessed, without too indiscriminate a mixture of great and small, and a want of sufficient shade,—a certain chaotic brilliancy, "dark with excess of light." Shelley (in the verses to a Lady with a Guitar) might well call himself Ariel. All the more enjoying part of his poetry is Ariel,—the "delicate" yet powerful "spirit," jealous of restraint, yet able to serve; living in the elements and the flowers; treading the "ooze of the salt deep," and running "on the sharp wind of the north;" feeling for creatures unlike himself; "flaming amazement" on them too, and singing exquisitest songs. Alas! and he suffered for years, as Ariel did in the cloven pine: but now he is out of it, and serving the purposes of Beneficence with a calmness befitting his knowledge and his love. TO A SKYLARK. I. Hail to thee, blithe spirit! In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.1 II Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest, Like a cloud of fire! The blue deep thou wingest, And singing, still dost soar: and soaring, ever singest III. In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun, O'er which clouds are brightening, Thou dost float and run; Like an embodied joy, whose race has just begun IV. The pale purple even Melts round thy flight; Like a star of heaven In the broad day-light Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight. V. Keen as are the arrows Of that silver sphere Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear, Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. VI. All the earth and air With thy voice is loud As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed. VII. What thou art we know not. What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see, As from thy presence showers a rain of melody VIII. Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not. IX. Like a high-born maiden2 In a palace tower, Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower. X. Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aerial hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view. XI. Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflowered Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves XII. Sound of vernal showers Rain-awakened flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. XV. What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain? Or how could thy note flow in such a crystal stream? XVIII. We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught: Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought. ΧΙΧ. Yet if we could scorn Hate and pride and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. XX. Better than all measures Of delightful sound, That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!3 XXI. Teach me half the gladness, From my lips would flow, The world should listen then, as I am listening now "In the spring of 1820," says Mrs. Shelley," we spent a week or two near Leghorn, borrowing the house of some friends, who were absent on a journey to England. It was on a beautiful summer evening, while wandering among the lanes where myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark, which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems."-Moxon's edition of 1840, p. 278. Shelley chose the measure of this poem with great felicity. The earnest hurry of the four short lines, followed by the long effusiveness of the Alexandrine, expresses the eagerness and continuity of the lark. There is a luxury of the latter kind in Shakspeare's song, produced by the reduplication of the rhymes : Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, And Phoebus 'gins arise His steeds to water at those springs On chalic'd flowers that lies: And winking mary-buds begin |