Shelley felt. In all this he resembles, at a great distance, Shakspere; and has, at that distance, and in this aspect of his art, a strength and a weakness similar to, but not identical with, that which Shakspere possessed, the strength of changeful activity of imagination, the weakness of being unable, through eagerness, to omit, to select, to co-ordinate his images. Yet, at his highest, when the full force of genius is urged by full and dominant emotion, what poetry it is! How magnificent is the impassioned unity of the whole in spite of the diversity of the parts! But this lofty height is reached in only a few of Shelley's lyrics, and in a few passages in his longer poems.

At almost every point, the scenery of the sky he drew so fondly images this temper of Shelley's mind, this incessant building and unbuilding, this cloudchangefulness of his imagination.

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb
I arise and unbuild it again.

That is a picture of Shelley himself at work on a feeling or on a thought. "I change, but I cannot die."

I might illustrate this love of the changing from the history of his life, of his affections, of his theories; from his varied nature, and way of work, as the prose thinker and the poet; from the variety of the sub

jects on which he wrote, and which he half attempted-for he naturally fell into the fragmentaryfrom the eagerness with which he searched for new thought, new experiences of feeling, new literatures, even from his love of the strange and sometimes of the horrible; from that uncontent he had in the doctrines of others, until he had added to them, as he did to Plato's doctrine of Love, something of his own in order to make them new,-were there any necessity to enlarge on that which stands so clear. In all these things, what was said of Shelley's movements to and fro in the house at Lerici is true of his movement through the house of thought or of feeling. “Oh, he comes and goes like a spirit, no one knows when or where." But it remains to be said, that all through this secondary changefulness, he held fast to certain primary ideas of life, of morality, and of his art, which no one who cares for him can fail to dis

cover.

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There was, then, in Shelley this love of indefiniteness, and this love of changefulness. Which of the two was the cause of the other I cannot tell, but I am inclined to think that the latter was the first. is better, however, to keep them both equally in view in the study of Shelley's art, and they are both well illustrated in his poetry of Nature.

I have said that his love of the indefinite with regard to a source of Nature weakened his work on Nature. His love of changefulness also weakened it

by luring the imagination away from a direct sight of the thing into the sight of a multitude of images suggested by the thing.

But in the case of those who have great genius, that which enfeebles one part of their work often gives strength to another, and in three several ways these elements in Shelley's mind made his work on Nature of great value.

1. His love of that which is indefinite and changeful made him enjoy and describe better than any other English poet that scenery of the clouds and sky which is indefinite owing to infinite change of appearance. The incessant forming and unforming of the vapours which he describes in the last verse of The Cloud, is that which he most cared to paint. Wordsworth often draws, and with great force, the aspect of the sky, and twice with great elaboration in the Excursion; but it is only a momentary aspect, and it is mixed up with illustrations taken from the works of men, with the landscape of the earth below where men are moving, with his own feelings about the scene, and with moral or imaginative lessons. Shelley, when he is at work on the sky, troubles it with none of these human matters, and he describes not only the momentary aspect, but also the change and progress of the sunset or the storm. And he does this with the greatest care, and with a characteristic attention to those delicate tones and halftones of colour which resemble the subtle imagina

tions and feelings he liked to discover in human Nature, and to which he gave form in poetry.

In his very first poem, in Queen Mab (Part II.), there is one of these studies of Sunset. It is splendidly eclipsed by that in the beginning of Julian and Maddalo, where the Euganean Hills are lifted away from the earth and made a portion of the scenery of the sky. A special moment of sunset, with the moon and the evening-star in a sky reddened with tempest, is given in Hellas, but here, being in a drama, it is mingled with the fate of an empire. The Dawns are drawn with the same care as the sunsets, but with less passion. There are many of them, but the most beautiful perhaps is that in the beginning of the second Act of the Prometheus. The changes of colour, as the light increases in the spaces of pure sky and in the clouds, are watched and described with precise truth; the slow progress of the dawn, during a long time, is noted down line by line, and all the movement of the mists and of the clouds "shepherded by the slow unwilling wind." Nor is that minuteness of observation wanting which is the proof of careful love. Shelley's imaginative study of beauty is revealed in the way the growth of the dawn is set before us by the waxing and waning of the light of the star, as the vapours rise and melt before the morn. The Storms are even better than the sunsets and dawns. I have drawn attention in the notes to the finest of these in the first canto of the Revolt of Islam.

There is another description at the beginning of the eleventh canto of the same poem (p. 82 of this book), in which the vast wall of blue cloud before which grey mists are flying is cloven by the wind, and the sunbeams, like a river of fire flowing between lofty banks, pour through the chasm across the sea, while the shattered vapours which the coming storm has driven forth to make the opening, are tossed, all crimson, into the sky. This is a favourite picture of Shelley's. In the Vision of the Sea it is transferred from sunset to sunrise. The fierce wind coming from the west rushes like a flooded river upon the dense clouds which are piled in the east, and rends them asunder, and through the gorge thus cleft

the beams of the sunrise flow in, Unimpeded, keen, golden and crystalline,

Banded armies of light and air.

The description is a little over-wrought, but criticism has no voice when it thinks that no other poet has ever attempted to render, with the same absolute loss of himself, the successive changes, minute by minute, of such an hour of tempest and of sunrise. We are alone with Nature; I might even say, We see Nature alone with herself. Still greater, more poetic, less sensational, is the approach of the gale in the Ode to the West Wind, where the wind itself is the river on which the forest of the sky shakes down its foliage of clouds, and these are tossed upwards like a Mænad's "uplifted hair," or trail downwards, like

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