to love Nature, when thus represented by Shelley, so well as we love her in Wordsworth.1

3. Lastly, on this subject, the vagueness and changefulness of Shelley's feeling and view of Nature, except in the instances mentioned, the dreams and shadows of it in his poetry that incessantly form and dissolve like the upper clouds of the sky, each fleeting while its successor is being born, and few living long enough to be outlined, are the only images we possess in art, save perhaps in music, of the many hours we ourselves pass with Nature when we neither think nor feel, but drift and dream incessantly from one impression to another, enjoying, but never defining our enjoyment, receiving moment by moment, but never caring to say to any single impression, "Stay and keep me company." In this thing also, Shelley's weakness made his power.

This want of definite belief and of its force belongs also to his conception of the ideal state of mankind. He does not see quite clearly what he desires for man, and describes the golden age chiefly by negatives of wrong. At times he rises into a passionate realisation of his

1 Shelley's love of the undefined and changing is still further illustrated by the fact that we see Nature in his poetry in these three ways-on all of which I have dwelt. We sometimes look on her as the ideal Pantheist beholds her; we look on her again as the mere reflection of the poet's moods; we look on her often as she may be in herself, apart from theories about her, apart from man.

Utopia, as he rises into Pantheism, but he cannot long remain in it. The high-wrought prophecy, too weak to keep the height it has gained, sinks down again and again into an abyss of seeming hopelessness. The last stanza of the Ode to Liberty is the type of many an hour of his life, and of the close of many a poem. But he never let hopelessness or depression master him. Shelley is full of resurrection power, and the fall from the peak of prophecy is more the result of reaction after impassioned excitement, than the result of any unbelief in his hopes for men, or in that on which they were grounded.

These hopes, that belief, had their strong foundation. There was one thing at least that Shelley grasped and realised with force in poetry—the moralities of the heart in their relation to the progress of Mankind. Love and its eternity; mercy, forgiveness, and endurance, as forms of love; joy and freedom, justice and truth as the results of love; the sovereign right of Love to be the ruler of the Universe, and the certainty of its victory, these were the deepest realities, the only absolute certainty, the only centre in Shelley's mind; and whenever, in behalf of the whole Race, he speaks of them, and of the duties and hopes that follow from them, strength is then instinctive and vital in his imagination. Neither now nor hereafter can men lose this powerful and profound impression. It is Shelley's great contribution to the progress of humanity.

But he could not combine with this large view and this large sympathy with the interests of Man, personal sympathy with personal human life. That is absent from his poetry, and his want of it was confirmed by his exile. Confined to a small circle of which he was the centre, among foreigners, feeling himself repudiated by the society of his own country, and incapable of such quiet association with the lives of men and women as Wordsworth loved and enjoyed, it is no wonder that large spaces of human life are entirely unreflected and unidealised in his poetry. The common human heart was not his theme, nor did he care to write of it. And, so far, he is less universal than Wordsworth, and less the great poet. But on the other hand he did two things, in his work on human nature, that Wordsworth could not do. First, he realised in song, so far as it was possible, the impalpable dreams of the poetic temperament, those which, when they arise in happiness, he expresses in the little poem, On a poet's lips I slept, and others also less joyous-the lonely wanderings of regretful thought, the imagination in its hours of childlike play with images, the moments when we are on the edge where emotion and thought incessantly change into one another, the visions of Nature which we compose but which are not Nature, the sorrows and depressions which have no name and to which we allot no cause, the depths of passionate fancy when we have not only no relation to mankind, but hate

to feel that relation. us nothing; and though what he does give us is of more use and worth to us as men who have to do with men, yet Shelley's work in this is dear to our personal life, and has in fact as much to do with one realm of humanity as the sorrow of Michael, or the daily life of the dalesmen have with another. English poetry needed the expression of these things; Shelley's expression of them is unique, but I doubt whether he would ever have expressed them in so complete a way had he not been thrown into isolation.

Of all this Wordsworth gives

Secondly, there is an element almost altogether wanting in Wordsworth, the absence of which forbids us to class him as a poet who has touched all the important sides of human life—the element of passionate love. A few of his poems, such as Barbara, or in another kind, Laodameia, solemnly glide into it and retreat, but on the whole, this, the most universal subject of lyric poetry, was not felt by Wordsworth. It was felt by Shelley, but not quite naturally, not as Burns, or even Byron felt it. Love, in his poetry, sometimes dies into dreams, sometimes likes its imagery better than itself. It is troubled with a philosophy; it seems now and again to be even bored, if I may be allowed the word, by its own ideality. As Shelley soared but rarely into definite Pantheism, so he rose but rarely into definite passion, nor does he often care to realise it. It was frequently

his deliberate choice to celebrate the love which did not "deal with flesh and blood," and as frequently, when he writes directly of love, he prefers to touch the lip of the cup, but not to drink, lest in the reality he should lose the charm of indefiniteness, of ignorance, of pursuit. Of course he was therefore fickle.

For this very reason, however, two realms in this aspect of his art belong to him. Neither of them is the realm of joyous passion, but one is the realm of its ideal approaches, and the other the realm of its ideal regret. No one has expressed so well the hopes, and fears, and fancies, and dreams, which the heart creates for its own pleasure and sorrow, when it plays with love which it realises within itself, but which it never means to realise without; and this is a realm which is so much lived in by many that they ought to be grateful to Shelley for his expression of it. No one else has done it, and it is perfectly done.

But still more perfect, and perhaps more beautiful than any other work of his, are the poems written in the realm of ideal Regret. Whenever he came close to earthly love, touched it, and then of his own will passed it by, it became, as he looked back upon it, ideal, and a part of that indefinite world he loved. The ineffable regret of having lost that which one did not choose to take, is most marvellously, most passionately expressed by Shelley. Song after song records it. The music changes from air to air, but the theme is the same, and so is the character of the