The personal element in Love, which is only a step towards the higher Love in Plato, is a distinct part of it in Shelley. And it was his profound feeling of the necessity of this for him that made him create, as part of his idea of Love, an ideal image of his own soul, a heightened, externalised personality of himself, whom he felt in Knowledge, in Woman, and in Nature, and to absolute union with whom, such union as is described in the latter part of Epipsychidion, he passionately aspired. But it is best to refer to Shelley himself for this invention, for this addition to the Platonic theory of Love. He expresses it fully enough in his Essay See the sentences beginning "Thou demandestWhat is Love?" They illustrate passage after passage in Alastor and in the other poems. See, also, verses 3, 4, and 5 of the poem of The Zucca.

on Love.

NOTE iv. p. 18, 19.

There can be no reason for these unearthly and unnatural scenes, except the wish to illustrate a temper of mind as unearthly and unnatural. They are the image of a mind tossed by the waves of impossible desire, and so maddened that only the quiet of death can follow. And so it is. The gentle stream follows, and the profound forest, and the ideal landscape, evening and death.

NOTE v. p. 25.

"On every side now rose

Rocks which, in unimaginable forms,
Lifted their black and barren pinnacles
In the light of evening, and its precipice,
Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above
'Mid toppling stones."

I cannot but think that the easiest explanation of this disputed passage is to read the for its. The precipice is mentioned afterwards in two or three passages, but in these passages it is spoken of as it is seen on the other side of the valley, beyond the gap, where it falls downwards to the

plain. What the poet sees now are, first, the sides of the valley rising with pinnacles of rock; and, secondly, in front of him, the towering sides sweeping round and closing up the valley in a precipitous curve, which, because it is between him and the descending sun, obscures the ravine where he is walking. This precipice, which shuts in the valley in front of him, opens its stony jaws ('the abrupt mountain breaks'), is disclosed, at first above, and afterwards below, as he walks on. He then sees the gate of the hills, and passing through it by the side of the stream, among the toppling stones, beholds the mighty landscape far below, in the light of evening and of the descending moon. But I am inclined to think that its is right. Its may either be carelessly used, as if he had mentioned the mountain, when he has only mentioned rocks, or, by one of those tortuous constructions, not uncommon in Shelley, its stands for its own—its own precipice obscuring the ravine.

NOTE vi. p. 25.

This wonderful description of a vast landscape is one of the many instances in Shelley of Nature presenting herself to him as she presented herself to the landscape-painter Turner.

NOTE vii. p. 28, last line.

The application of the adjectives has been discussed. But it seems plain enough. It is quite in Shelley's manner, as in the "Ode to the West Wind," in "When the lamp is shattered," and in many other poems, to go back to and bring together his illustrations. Here the poet's frame is a lute, a bright stream, a dream of youth. The lute is still, the stream is dark and dry, the dream is unremembered.

NOTE viii. p. 31, 33.

These two poems are inserted here from their striking the same note as the last scene in Alastor.

NOTE ix. p. 40.

This is part of the introduction of Hellas. The first and third verses are sung by a chorus of Greek captive women while Mahmud is sleeping, the second and fourth verses by the Indian slave who sits beside his couch.

NOTE x. p. 42, 43.

This is a splendid example of that highly wrought painting of cloud and sky in which Shelley stands almost alone among English poets. There are fine examples in Wordsworth and Byron, but they have neither the detail, nor the splendour, nor the subtilty of colour that Shelley puts into his skies. This might be a description of one of Turner's storm skies. The long trains of tremulous mist that precede the tempest, the cleft in the storm-clouds, and seen through it, high above, the space of blue sky, fretted with fair clouds, the pallid semicircle of the moon with mist on its upper horn, the flying rack of clouds below the serene spot-all are as Turner saw them; but painting cannot give what Shelley gives-the growth and progress of the changes of the storm.

NOTE xi. p. 47.

I have only inserted the Mask, and left out its explanation. That explanation, in its two parts, has seemed to me to trouble, as all explanations do, and especially an artist's, the work of art.

NOTE xii. p. 83.

This is another of those pictured skies in which Shelley excels. They are almost the only aspects of Nature which he sees with absolute clearness, and describes with absolute directness. This could be painted from, but then only Turner could have painted it, or would have cared to paint it.

NOTE xiii. p. 93.

"The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their peaks transparent."

Nothing can be more accurate. In certain states of atmosphere, when the sun sinks over those hills in autumn, they change as it were into violet vapour, and seem no less transparent to the eye.

In this poem, Julian and Maddalo, Shelley employs, he says, a certain familiar style of language. It is not gracefully or easily employed, nor is the language familiar. In the narrative parts it actually resembles the style of Shelley's novels Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, and is prosaic beyond any. thing in Wordsworth.

"My dear friend,

Said Maddalo, my judgment will not bend
To your opinion, though I think you might
Make such a system refutation-tight

As far as words go."

That is prose, and bad prose, and it does not stand alone.

In the descriptive parts, the poem is, of course, not familiar, but highly imaginative. In the tale of the Madman, its passion lifts it wholly out of the familiar. Excellent indeed as Julian and Maddalo is, its note is peculiar and unequal, nor are its elements kindly mixed. And this partly arises from Shelley having put so much of himself into the Madman, that the character is not separated from his own, that is, from Julian's, with sufficient sharpness. Julian and the Madman grow into one another as we read.

NOTE xiv. p. III.

It is interesting to compare with Mont Blanc, Letter iv. to Peacock. It contains the germ of many of the images used,

and of the thoughts expressed in the poem.

NOTE xv. p. 119.

I saw once, from a tower that overlooked two rookeries, this very thing. The moment the sun's disk had fully climbed over the edge of a distant wood, the whole band of rooks, from both their homes, silent before, rose, all the

birds together, with a great "hail" into the air, and hovering together for a second or two, streamed down the wind towards the sun.

NOTE xvi. p. 132.

I have put in this extract from Rosalind and Helen, that its feebler work may be compared with Shelley's treatment of the same subject, under the influence of passion, in the Recollection.

NOTE xvii. p. 134.

In

This is the same subject as The Zucca of the poems. this form it occurs in an unfinished drama, and is more in the special manner of Shelley than is the poem itself. The subject, thus twice treated, and alluded to also in the Witch of Atlas (p. 210, line 5), grew out of a real incident which is described in one of the Shelley letters.

NOTE xviii. p. 146, lines 15, 16.

This is the second time that Shelley borrows this phrase from Wordsworth; from the Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a picture of Peele Castle.

"Whene'er I looked, thy image still was there;
It trembled, but it never passed away."

NOTE xix. p. 148.

The poems of the preceding section I have called Poems of Nature and Man, because in them, as in some others elsewhere placed in this book, Shelley has mixed up Nature with human feeling, chiefly with his own feeling. In some of these poems, which I have called Poems of pure Nature, he writes of Nature as his special form of Pantheism, if I may call it that, urged him. He writes of her apart from Man, as the outward image of an all-sustaining, all-pervading Love, whom he embodied in the creation of Asia. Nay, he sometimes writes of this Love alone, and seems to forget that there is any image of her in the outward world. She is