filled with a swarm of ideas, fancies, thoughts, streaming on without his volition, without plan or order; he might be pardoned for fancying that they were all; he could not see the outward world for them, their giddy passage occupied him till he forgot himself."

This doctrine he derived from the writings of Berkeley and Hume, though he differs from each of these philosophers from Berkeley in denying the existence of individual minds, from Hume in admitting the existence of something besides sensations, universal mind. Yet this mind is neither personal, nor the ultimate cause of things. It is not a cause at all, for "it cannot create: it can only perceive." And he adds, "It is extremely improbable that the cause of mind, that is, of existence, is similar to mind."1

These ideas are mainly negative; but to them Shelley added a positive conception derived from Plato, viz. that these sensations, with which alone we are acquainted in this world, are imperfect shadows of a higher world into which, perhaps, we may pass at death, where exist in perfection the archetypes of all we dimly perceive here.2 He did not bring this conception into logical connection with his other theories. Logic had nothing to do with his acceptance of it. He was brought to it by his persistent discontent with the actual and by his yearning for ideals that would completely satisfy the cravings of his nature. "I seek in what I see," he said, “the manifestation of something beyond the present and tangible object."

One of these archetypes plays a very important rôle in Shelley's poetry, the archetype of beauty. About this conception some of those feelings cluster which, in the case of the majority of men, connect themselves with the idea of a personal god. Upon this conception of an all-sufficing

1 On Life, in Prose Works, Vol. II, p. 263.

2 See the concluding stanzas of the Adonais, and notes thereon.

beauty which but faintly manifests itself in the various forms of beauty known in this world, the poet dwells with extraordinary fondness and enthusiasm in the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, the Prometheus, and elsewhere; and the intense passion which permeates the lines in which he speaks of it, is one of the most extraordinary of Shelley's peculiarities. Sometimes, in his impatient yearning for that perfect rapture which should gratify at once every complex need of his nature, he hoped to find, even in this world, the incarnation of this ideal in female form. The consequent experience, the inevitable disappointment is enshrined in Alastor and Epipsychidion. As the desire for the ideal, in other words, beauty, was his strongest motive, he sometimes conceives this beauty as the moving force of the universe, the ultimate spirit which works toward good in the mind of man and in the external world. This is Shelley's nearest approach to the conception of the divine, and it receives its most adequate poetic expression in the Adonais. But, though there spoken of as a 'spirit,' it is a spirit without personal attributes, a blind power which impels all that is highest and best in the world, something as vague and impersonal as the modern conception of force, one and indestructible, though manifesting itself in various forms and in countless phenomena.

Poetry whose substance consists of philosophical and abstract ideas labors under a twofold disadvantage. In the first place, such themes lack interest for ordinary readers and lend themselves but little to emotional treatment. In the second place, there is less of permanence in the results attained by the abstract reason than in the direct results of observation. The pictures of human life by a Homer or a Shakespeare are always fresh; the theories of one generation of philosophic thinkers become inadequate and childish to another. Shelley was not even a pro

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found philosophic thinker; his theories were at no time systematically wrought out; their inadequacy is unfavorable to the popularity and permanence of the writings in which they are embodied. To our generation, the absence of the conception of development is a prime defect. On the other hand, Shelley's work is interesting historically as the most adequate and beautiful expression, in English poetry, of certain tendencies in thought and feeling associated with the beginnings of the modern democratic period. some of these tendencies are still potent forces, and seem likely to remain so. The enthusiasm for humanity, the feeling of the brotherhood of man, the sense of the responsibility of society at large and of each individual in it for the condition of its members, the belief in the capacity of woman for a wider and more public sphere of action,these and kindred feelings find their first, and, as yet, their most beautiful poetic expression in the writings of Shelley. Let us now turn to the second division of Shelley's poetry, to that portion which reflects his more purely individual life and feelings. The matter is personal; the form usually, though not always, lyric. It is in his lyrics that Shelley is most successful, and among them are to be found the only poems which are in any degree popular. As a lyric poet, he is unsurpassed in a certain peculiar and limited sphere, a sphere, too, somewhat outside of the experiences and understanding of the ordinary man.

In the beginnings of literary development, lyric poetry gives expression to universal and obvious emotions. The joys of victory, of love, of feasting, the sorrows of death and parting, these are things which all men have felt, and which all can understand. But, in process of ages, as life grows more complex, and men more observant and selfconscious, less obvious shades of these joys and sorrows, subtle interminglings of them, new and unusual emotions

connected with higher intellectual experiences, are reproduced by the lyric poet. For the singing of many of the substantial joys and sorrows of humanity, Shelley was not specially qualified either by temperament or by experience. His abnormal physical and mental constitution made him much less fit for such a task than many of his predecessors. On the other hand, the peculiarities and intensity of his nature did furnish him with the experience which fitted him to be the exponent of more subtle and impalpable states of mind. More particularly, his feeble hold on reality, his discontent with existing things, the disposition to take refuge from them in the realm of his own thoughts and fancies, enabled him to write of the feelings connected with the ideal, the remote, the impalpable. In the substantial present Shelley did not much delight; but the future, with its possibilities and its promise of perfections not yet realized, and the past, with that halo of imaginative beauty which does not belong to it when in our grasp, but which it wins as it recedes, these were themes that suited his genius. We see this illustrated when he writes of love. "No one," says Mr. Stopford Brooke, "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 realizes within itself, but which it never means to realize without. 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." Here, as elsewhere, he does not sing the joys of satisfaction, for he was never satisfied, but the yearnings of desire. Again,

there are emotional sequences which are scarcely connected with anything actual, or, at least, with anything definitely realized, such emotions as are expressed and aroused by music. These are too vague to be called thought or to be uttered as such, but Shelley is skilled in suggesting them in an indirect way, through analogies, imagery, and the music of verse. Again and again this power is illustrated in the Prometheus. Even when the feelings which he voices are based upon substantial experiences, Shelley is so wrapped up in the emotion that he neglects altogether, or vaguely indicates, the concrete causes. Hence such obscurity as we find in Julian and Maddalo, where the facts which would enable us to grasp the situation of the poor lunatic are withheld. 66 'Facts," says Shelley, "are not what we want to know in poetry, in history, in the lives of individual men, in satire, or in panegyric. They are the mere divisions, the arbitrary points on which we hang, and to which we refer those delicate and evanescent hues of mind which language delights and instructs us in proportion as it expresses.' All this gives a vagueness to Shelley's poetry which almost forbids analysis or reduction to a kernel of solid fact. The hard-headed man who may be able to appreciate the good sense and accurate observation enshrined in the plays of Shakespeare, but who has little experience of or care for the subtle feelings and vague aspirations belonging to imaginative and emotional natures, and on whom the purely technical graces of verse have but little effect, turns aside from the poetry of Shelley as meaningless rhetoric.

Shelley's love for the ideal and the vague influences his treatment of material nature. Here, with a tendency analogous to that exhibited in his treatment of human life, he turns from scenery of an ordinary character to the unusual, gigantic, and mysterious,-huge cliffs, vast mountains, dark woods and caves. Indeed, much of the scenery of his