"but am not successful.

It was written

he says, without much care, and in one of those few moments of enthusiasm which now seldom visit me, and which make me pay dear for their visits." Two poems, however, preceded Hellas; Epipsychidion and Adonais. Both are written by the lonely artist; nor is there any trace in them of the Shelley who prophesied for Man. Of Epipsychidion I have spoken in the notes of this book. The ideal passion, in which it originated, hid him in the light of thought, far away from humanity, and he never quite got back again.

Adonais, awakened in him not only by his sympathy with Keats, but also by the resemblance of the fate of Keats to his own, is almost as much concerned with Shelley as with its subject. There is nothing in English poetry so steeped in passionate personality as the description of himself in stanzas xxxi-iv.

It

is almost too close, too unveiled, too intense to have been written. The only other poet-for Byron's selfdescription is written with a view to effect-who has approached the wild self-sorrow of it, is Cowper, and he uses the same simile of the stricken stag. The poem is, as Shelley said, "a highly wrought piece of art." Its abstract spirituality, and its philosophy, remove it from the ordinary apprehension, and are the cause why it is less read than Alastor. But, in truth, Shelley himself, and the scenery and personages he creates in this abstract realm, are more real in this poem than in others which have to

do with the actual world. It suited him to write about a spirit, and he wrote as he were himself a spirit. The Dreams which hover round Adonais, the Splendours and Glooms, Morning with the tears in her hair, Spring wild with grief, Echo singing in the hills, Urania flying to mourn beside the bierShelley has succeeded in giving them all being. While we read, we believe in the reality of this world as we believe in our dreams while we dream. The power of doing this is unique, and is due not only to imagination at its height, but also to keenness of abstract intellect. His grip of these impalpable personages is quite certain. He creates them, and then he sees and hears them. Owing to this the conduct of the poem is clear. The unremitting beauty of the lines so engages attention as at first to forbid an analysis of the arrangement, but when that analysis is made, the pleasure Adonais gives is not disturbed, but doubled. And how passionate it is throughout, more passionate than most of his love poems ! It is unceasingly strange, and the strangeness adds, from outside, to the charm of Shelley's poetry, to find him writing with a far greater intensity of feeling about the sorrow of Urania and the Dreams, about the Spirit of Love in the Universe, about Keats in the spiritual world, and about his own wearied and solitary heart, than he ever writes about men or women, about human love, or about the personal suffering of others.

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 of the Aurelian wall. So deep is that resting-place

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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Italy awakens in Englishmen who love her, rather than of the purely English spirit. The Italian air, the sentiment of Italy, fled and dreamed through their poems, but most through those of Shelley. It was but fitting, then, that Shelley, whose fame was England's, should be buried in the city which is the heart of Italy. But he was born far away from this peaceful and melancholy spot, and grew up to manhood under the grey skies of England, until its Universities, its Church, its Society, its Law and its dominant policy became inhospitable to him, nay, even his own father cast him out. They all had, in the opinion of sober men of that time, good cause to make him a stranger, for he attacked them all, and it would be neither wise or true, nor grateful to Shelley himself, were he to be put forward as a genius unjustly treated, or as one who deserved or asked for pity. Those who separate themselves from society, and war against its dearest maxims, if they are as resolute in their choice, and as firm in their beliefs as Shelley, count the cost, and do not or rarely complain when the penalty is exacted. He was exiled, and it was no wonder. The opinion of the world did not trouble him, nor was that a wonder. But as this exile is the most prominent fact of his life, its influence is sure to underlie his work. The second question that any one who writes of Shelley has to ask, is, How did this exile from the Education, Law, Religion, and Society of his country, and from the soil of his country itself, affect his poetry?

It had a very great influence, partly for good and partly for evil. The good it did is clear. It deepened his individuality and the power which issued from that source. It set him free from the poetic conventions to which his art might have yielded too much obedience in England—a good which the obscurity of Keats also procured for him-it prevented him from being worried too much by the blind worms of criticism, it enabled him to develop himself more freely, and it placed him in contact with a natural scenery, fuller and sunnier than he could ever have had in England, in which his love of beauty found so happy and healthy a food that it came to perfect flower. In Italy also, where impulse even more than reason urges intelligence and inspires genius, lyrical poetry, which is born of impulse, is more natural and easy, though not better, than elsewhere, and the very inmost spirit of Shelley, deeper than his metaphysics or his love of Man and inspiring both, deeper even than any personal passion, was the lyrical longing of his whole body, soul, and spirit—" O that I had wings like a dove; then would I flee away, and be at rest."

But the good this exile did his art was largely counterbalanced by its harm. Shelley's individuality, unchecked by that of others, grew too great, and tended not only to isolate him from men, but to prevent his art from becoming conversant enough with human life. The absence of critical sympathy of a