is never described for herself alone, never for pure joy in her. She is made to reflect the thoughts and passion of the wandering poet until the very last, when his life and that of the moon ebb away together. This is deliberately done, and nowhere in a finer way than in the description of the long walk down the glen. We follow step by step the interpenetration of the poet's dying soul and of the various changes of the scene. As the brook flows to the precipice, so does his life; as the valley alters its landscape, so does the landscape in his heart. The skill and intensity with which this is wrought out is the cause of the fascination that passage has for all who read it.

In the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and to Mont Blanc, written after Alastor, Shelley, though writing only as the artist of his own thought, has recovered some of his hopes for Man. He tries to connect his worship of Beauty with the redemption of the race; he speaks of the Power hidden in the great mountain to "repeal large codes of fraud and woe." His Continental journey had brought him new health, and his life, new happiness, and with them came back the old longing and the old interest to play his part in the movement of the world. The result was the Revolt of Islam. Its genesis and its aim are explained in the preface with which he accompanied the poem. It seemed to Shelley that the age of despair that followed the end of the French Revolution was over,

and that now, when the reaction from that trance of failure had begun, the time had arrived for him to speak. In that belief he composed this poem. It strove to kindle afresh the flame of liberty, but it had no effect on the exhausted Englishmen of 1818. Nor, as poetry, did it deserve to have a great effect. It is the most unbalanced of all his works. The interest is human, but it is too frequently taken out of the world of actual human life to awaken practical emotion. Were the scenery of the poem all ideal, or all real, we should not be so troubled while we read. Were the poem supremely ethical or supremely emotional, had it any unity at all, it might keep its power over us. But it has no unity, not even in feeling. Its emotion is unequal; we are continually changing the atmosphere, and are overchilled or overheated. There is no artistic fusion of the poetry which aims at giving a high pleasure with that which aims at awakening man to his duties. That fusion was made in the Prometheus Unbound, but here it was not made.

And now another of these changes took place. Shelley fell ill again, the threatened loss of his children preyed upon him, and he left England for ever in 1818. He lost again for a time his enthusiasm for man, and the characteristic of the work of this year is sadness deepening into misery. few exceptions the poems are personal. ever, differs from all that preceded it. Maddalo, composed at the end of the year, is personal,

With very

One, howJulian and

but still not so much so as to prevent Shelley from painting, with a firm hand, another character than his own. It is the first instance of that power of losing himself in the creation of distinct personages which enabled him to write the drama of the Cenci. Julian and Maddalo has unity, and the materials are carefully woven together. The style is subdued to a quiet level, and the imagination, which ran riot in the Revolt of Islam, is curbed to do its work, and only its special work, by the will of the poet. Reading it, we should predict that if again the enthusiasm for man should awaken in Shelley's heart, the work he would do on the subject would be more worthy of his power. It did awaken, and in how different a form it came ! It was no longer hampered by his notion that he must directly attack evil. It rose at once and easily, taking with it all the subjects of the Revolt of Islam, into the region of pure art, and there, in the world of passion and beauty and fire, he wrote the Prometheus Unbound. That poem is the marriage of Shelley's double nature, the fusion for creative work of the lover of man and the poet. He reaches in it that culminating point at which the thinker on man gives his best-loved materials to the artist, and the artist breathes into them life and beauty.

The same vivid interest in humanity was then made special in the Cenci, a tragedy wrought out with so much temperance of imagination, directness of emotion, and closeness of thought, that it is the strangest

contrast to the Prometheus. The range of power implied in the production of these two dramas within twelve months, each so great, and so unlike, is rarely to be paralleled among the poets below those of the highest order. It is all the more wonderful when we think that about the same time such poems were also created as the Sensitive Plant, the Skylark, the Cloud, Arethusa, and the Ode to the West Wind. The last alone is enough to place Shelley apart from the other lyrical poets of England. In it, as in the Prometheus, and still more splendidly, all his powers and his poetic subjects are wrought into a whole. The emotion awakened by the approaching storm sets on fire other sleeping emotions in his heart, and the whole of his being bursts into flame around the first emotion. This is the manner of the genesis of all the noblest lyrics. He passes from magnificent union of himself with Nature and magnificent realisation of her storm and peace, to equally great self-description, and then mingles all nature and all himself together, that he may sing of the restoration of mankind. There is no song in the whole of our literature more passionate, more penetrative, more full of the force by which the idea and its form are united into one creation.

This time, during which Shelley's twofold being was married for creative work, did not last long. The two elements always tended to separate, and now the special Shelley element, which fled from man into

the recesses of his own heart, or communed with the ideal Nature which he made for himself out of the apparent world, began to absorb him, and finally drove out the other.

At the beginning of this reaction he was still gay, often bright; and the Letter to Maria Gisborne is one of the rare poems in which Shelley is at peace. An air of home and happiness flows through its familiar and melodious verse. The Witch of Atlas also belongs to this time; a poem in which he sent his imagination out, like a child into a meadow, without any aim save to enjoy itself. Now and again Shelley himself, as it were from a distance, alters or arranges the manner of the sport, as if with some intention, but never so much as to spoil the natural wildness of the Imagination's play. Enough is done to suggest that there may be a meaning in it all, but not enough to tell that meaning. "I mean nothing,” Shelley would have said; "I did not write the poem. My imagination made it of her own accord." Nor was he so self-absorbed at first as wholly to neglect the cause of man. The Ode to Liberty, the Ode to Naples, belong to this summer and autumn of 1820.

We pass into the isolated poet with the Sensitive Plant, the companionless flower; and from this time forth the old Shelley, who loved Mankind, is dead. The only exception is the choral drama of Hellas, written in a transient enthusiasm for the cause of Greece. "I try to be what I might have been,"