A new element of isolation, that created by a passion which circumstances forbade him to pursue, separated him now, at the close of his life, still more from Mankind, and in that temper he died. But there are some proofs, to which I shall afterwards draw attention, that he would, as before, have passed out of this lonely inner life, and found himself again in sympathy with the external. Had he lived, he would have once more appeared as the Singer of Man, and in the cause of men. But the swift wind and the mysterious sea, the things he loved, slew their lover-a common fate-and we hear no more his singing. His work was done, and its twofold nature may well be imaged by the Sea that received into its uninhabited breast his uncompanioned spirit ; for, while its central depths know only solitude, over its surface are always passing to and fro the life and fortunes of humanity.

But the sea gave up its dead, and all of Shelley's body that was rescued from flood and fire lies now where the rise of the ground ends, in a dark nook So deep is that resting-place

of the Aurelian wall.

in shadow that the violets blossom later there than on "the slope of green access where, seen from Shelley's grave, the flowers grow over the dust of Adonais. We may be glad that both were buried in Italy rather than in England, for, though no Italian could have written their poetry, yet it was, -in all things else different,-of that spirit which

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good kind, such as that which flows from one poet to another in a large society, left some of his work, as it left some of Keats', more formless, more intemperate, more impalpable, more careless, more apart from the realities of life, than it ought to have been in the most poetical of poets since the days of Elizabeth. Even in his lyric work, the impassioned impulse would have failed less often to fulfil its form perfectly; there would not have been so many fragments thrown aside for want of patience or power to complete them, had he been less personal, less subject to individual freakishness, more subject to the unexpressed criticism which floats, as it were, in the air of a large literary society, and constrains the art of the poet into measured act and power. And as to

Nature, we should perhaps have had, with his genius, a much wider and less ideal representation of her, had he not been so enthralled by the vastness and homelessness of Swiss, and by the ideality of Italian scenery. Even when he did write in England itself, the recollected love of Switzerland and the Rhine mingled with the impressions he received from the Thames, and produced a scenery, as in certain passages in Alastor and the Revolt of Islam, which is not directly studied from anything in heaven or earth. It is none the worse for that, but it is not Nature, it is Art.

These are general considerations, but there were some more particular results, partly good and partly

evil, of this separation of Shelley from the ordinary religious and political views of English society.

A good deal of his poetry became polemical, and polemical, like satiric poetry, is apart from pure art. It attacks evil directly, and the poet, his mind being then fixed not on the beautiful but on the base, writes prosaically. Or it embodies a creed in verse, and, being concerned with doctrine, becomes dull. In both cases the poet misses, as Shelley did, that inspiration of the beautiful which arises from the seeing of truth, not from the seeing of a lie; from the love of true ideas, not from their intellectual perception. The verses, for example, in the Ode to Liberty, which directly attack kingcraft and priestcraft, however gladly one would see their sentiments in prose, are inferior as poetry to all the rest; and it is the same throughout all Shelley's poetry of direct attack on evil. This polemical element in the Revolt of Islam, and the endeavour to lay down in it his revolutionary creed, are additional causes of the wastes of prosaic poetry which make it so unreadable. The very splendour and passion of the passages devoted to Nature and Love contrast so sharply, like burning spaces of sunlight on a grey sea, with the wearisome whole, that they lose half their value, and disturb, like so much else, the unity of the poem. The same things seem true of Rosalind and Helen, and of those political poems which are direct attacks on abuses in England. On the other hand, when Shelley wrote on these evils in

directly, inspired by the opposing truths, concerned with their beauty, and borne upwards by delight in them, his work entered the realm of art, and his poetry became magnificent. There is no finer example of this than Prometheus Unbound. The subject is at root the same as that of the Revolt of Islam, the things opposed are the same, the doctrine is the same, but the whole method of approaching his idea and fulfilling its form is changed, and all the questions are brought into that artistic representation which stirs around them inspiring and enduring emotion.

The good Shelley did in this way was very great. At a time when England, still influenced by its abhorrence of the Reign of Terror, by its fear of France and Napoleon, was most dead to the political ideas that had taken form in 1789, Shelley gave voice, through art, to these ideas, and encouraged that hope of a golden age which, however vague, does so much for human progress. He threw around these things imaginative emotion, and added all its power to the struggle for freedom.

Still greater is the unrecognised work he did in the same way for theology in England. That theology was no better than all theology had become under the influence of the imperial and feudal ideas of Europe. Its notion of God, and of man in relation to God, partly Hebraic, and therefore sacerdotal and sacrificial, partly deeply dyed with asceticism and

other elements derived from the Oriental notion of the evil of matter, was further modified by the political views of the Roman Empire, transferred to God by the Roman Church. And when the universal ideas regarding mankind, and a return to nature, were put forth by France, they clashed instantly with this limited, sacerdotal, ascetic, aristocratic, and feudal theology. The sovereign right of God, because He was omnipotent, to destroy the greater part of His subjects, the right of a caste of priests to impose their doctrines on all, and to exile from religion all who did not agree with them; the view that whatever God was represented to do was right, though it might directly contradict the nature, the conscience, and the heart of Man; these, and other related views had been brought to the bar of humanity, and condemned from the intellectual point of view by a whole tribe of thinkers. But if a veteran theology is to be disarmed and slain, it needs to be brought not only into the arena of thought and argument, but into the arena of poetic emotion. A great part of that latter work was done in England by Shelley. He indirectly made, as time went on, an ever-increasing number of men feel that the will of God could not be in antagonism to the universal ideas concerning Man, that His character could not be in contradiction to the moralities of the heart, and that the destiny He willed for mankind must be as universal and as just and loving as Himself. There are more clergymen, and more religious lay