music. And, like all the rest of his work, it is unique.

But in this matter, a change passed over Shelley before he died. It is impossible not to feel that the poems written for Mrs. Williams, a whole chain of which exist, are different from the other love poems. They have the same imaginative qualities as the previous songs, and they belong also to the two realms of which I have written above, but there is a new note in them, the beginning of the unmistakable directness of passion. It is, of course, modified by the circumstances, but there it is. And it is from the threshold of this actual world that he looks back on Epipsychidion and feels that it belonged to "a part of him that was already dead.” The philosophy which made Emilia the shadow of a spiritual Beauty is conspicuous by its total absence from all these later love poems. Moreover, they are not, like the others, all written in the same atmosphere. The atmosphere of ideal love, however varied its cloud-imagery, is always the same thin ether. But these poems breathe in the changing atmosphere of the Earth, and they one and all possess reality. Every one feels that Ariel to Miranda, The Invitation, The Recollection, have the variety of true passion. But none of them reach the natural joy of Burns in passionate love. Two exceptions, however, exist, both dating from this time, and both written away from his own life-the Bridal Song,

and the song To Night. These seem to prove that, had Shelley lived, we might have had from him vivid, fresh, and natural songs of passion.

Had he lived! Had not the sea been too envious, what might we not have possessed and loved! It were too curious perhaps to speculate, but Shelley seems to have been recovering the power of working on subjects beyond himself, in the quiet of those last days at Lerici. He was always capable of rising again, and the extreme clearness and positive element of his intellect acted, like a sharp physician, on his passion-haunted heart and freed it, when it was out-wearied with its own feeling, from self-slavery.

While still at Pisa, at the beginning of 1822, Shelley set to work on a Drama, Charles I., the motive of which was to be the ruin of the king through pride and its weakness, the same motive as Coriolanus. It was to be "the birth of severe and high feelings," and to transcend the Cenci as a work of art. But severe feeling was not then the temper of his mind, nor could he at that time lose himself enough to create an external world. He laid the play aside, saying that he had not sufficient interest in English history to continue it. Yet it is plain, even from the fragments we possess, how great was the effort Shelley then made to realise, even more than in the Cenci, other characters than his own. There is not a trace in it of his own self. It is full of steady power, power more at its ease than in the Cenci. The characters stand clear,

and are carefully distinguished, so as not only to represent the various elements in England which brought about, in their clashing together, the ruin of monarchy, but also to show the forces and weaknesses in each of the greater personages which led to their personal ruin or success. The unconscious movement of Shelley's imagination—within the speeches set to each character-in vivid illustration, in quick invention of changes of feeling, and in its harmonising of the whole and the parts, is, like the excellence just mentioned, in the manner of Shakspere's art, and approaches his strength. Archy, the fool, is made perhaps too imaginative in phrase, yet he is much nearer than any other poet's creation of the same kind to the fools of Shakspere, so wise because they are half mad. Yet neither in this, nor in the rest, does Shelley directly imitate Shakspere here, as he sometimes does in the Cenci. The principles of Shakspere's art are followed; the work itself is quite original. The same thing is true of the blank verse. It is built on the model of Shakspere's, but it is Shelley's own, and its movement, sure to be beautiful in the hands of this master of all melody in all kinds of verse, is more free, more fitted to the changing moods of the speakers, and more delightful than it is in the Cenci. The noble speech of Hampden, with which this fragment concludes, illustrates and confirms all I have said. It is quite plain that it cannot be said of the artist who did this piece of work that he had exhausted his vein.

It becomes still more clear that Shelley would have done far more for us when we consider the Triumph of Life, to write which he threw aside Charles I. I have excluded it from these Selections, only because it is unfinished. It is difficult to comprehend, for it is but an introduction, the bearing of which could only have been explained by the rest of the poem. The terza rima, the broken condition in which we have what was written, and the visionary, allegorical element, make it still more difficult. But it was the last thing he wrote, and he may have been composing it when he was overwhelmed. Over it gathers, then, all the tenderness which belongs to last words, and all their interest. What were his thoughts, we ask, about life now? Can we understand anything from

this fragment of what he was at Lerici ?

I will close this Preface with an analysis of this remarkable poem, nor can I close it better. The Triumph of Life is the gravest thing Shelley ever wrote, and it has a deep interest for this generation. Its personal interest as a revelation of his view of life, of the change of some of his views on moral matters, of his retention of youthful theories, can scarcely be over-estimated.

It opens with a noble picture of sunrise, filled with solemn and stately images, and more disengaged from self than any of Shelley's previous work. He then describes himself passing into a waking trance, in which he is conscious that in some previous exist

ence he has been in the same place, and heard and seen the same things. And in that trance he sees a

Vision.

He finds himself on a dusty and flowerless road, on either side of which is a forest full of sweet streams and flowers and lawns, and on the road a multitude of folk, old age and youth, and manhood and infancy, all hastening onward like a torrent. This represents, under the common allegory, the ordinary life of men. What kind of life that now seemed to Shelley is described in the lines which begin

"Some flying from the thing they feared,"

but of all this crowd, none, so hurried and so serious was their folly, could hear the sweetness of the stream or know the beauty of the wood. Nor did any understand -and this was the universal condition," whither he went or whence he came, or why he made one of the multitude." Life is an inexplicable secret, and in the terrible attraction this secret has for men and in their failure to solve it, lies the reason of the victory Life wins over its victims. In the midst of this crowd the Triumph passes by. As the throng grew wilder, a cold glare, that obscured the sun with a false light, came, and in the glare a chariot, and in the chariot, Life, the Conqueror. None could see its incommunicable face, double-hooded, double-caped, over its head a cloud-like crape; nor its form, crouching like age within the car, as one who sat in the shadow of a