tively free from the fault to which we adverted above;-if these are not poetry, we will not say poetry almost unequalled for beauty of conception, richness, and appropriateness of expression, and melody of versification; we do not insist upon this; we are content to have him degraded to the level of a second or third rate poet;-if these are denied to be poetry, the discussion is at an end; there is no common ground of argument. We are at issue with regard to the very essentials of poetry; for any definition, in which the above passages shall not be included, baffles our comprehension.

With regard to the moral tendency of Shelley's works, the same criterion must be applied. It is nothing to the purpose to say, that they must necessarily be immoral, from the nature of their subjects. Such, indeed, is the received logic-they must be so, therefore they are so: but this is a mere fallacy. It is not the subject on which an author writes, but the spirit in which he treats it, that determines the tendency of his work. It might as well be said that Professor Milman must be a moral and religious /writer, because his dramas are on sacred subjects*. The true question is what is the effect produced by Shelley's writings on the reader? Are they characterized by sentimental impurity, by high-wrought pictures of vice, with sophistical endeavours to confound the right and the wrong, with brutal jests on what is good and generous, and cold-hearted sneers at the belief in human virtue? Are they calculated to foster the sensual or the malignant passions? Are they writings to which a bad man would resort in search of food for his depraved propensities? We answer without hesitation--no. Such spirits, like Milton's builders of Babel, would quickly be "famished of breath" in that "thin clime." Even Wordsworth is scarcely worse adapted to that purpose. The tendency of his writings is uniformly elevated; they teach us, through the medium of lofty images and impassioned exhortation, to rise above petty interests, envy, vanity, and low enjoyments; to investigate and follow out the boundless capabilities of our being; to "fear ourselves, and love all human kind."

We are far, indeed, from holding him forth as a moral writer par excellence; though his faults were, perhaps, rather of omission than commission. There is a vagueness in his system; a want of substantial foundation for his principles; there is a turbulence, and a feverish restlessness, too much removed from that calm in

We mean no disparagement to a man of Mr. Milman's talents and acquirements; but we can never hear his works extolled for their religious tendency, without thinking of Jemmy Twitcher in Gray;

"Besides, he repents-for he talks about God."

which wisdom loves to dwell; and there are a few pictures of passion which may be considered as too warmly wrought, sublimed as they are, and almost purified, by the atmosphere of noble thoughts and images with which they are surrounded. But let the reader compare the impression left on him by these poems with that resulting from the perusal of any one of those works which are universally allowed to be immoral; and let him declare, from his heart, whether he considers them writings of the same class. They inculcate truth and simplicity of heart, intellectual liberty and enlargement of thought, a passionate devotion to the graces and sublimities of nature, and above all, a love for others, fervent, deep-seated, persevering, unlimited by place or circumstance, and patient of shame, labour, and suffering, in the glorious endeavour to promote the general welfare;

They inculcate a belief in the immutability of virtue, in the omnipotence of right intention, and in the final happiness and exaltation of human nature, to be brought about by the exertions and self-sacrifices of the good and wise;

"Life may change, but it may fly not;
Hope may vanish, but can die not;

Truth be veil'd-but still it burneth;
Love repulsed-but it returneth!"

If this is not religion, it is something not wholly unallied to it; and there are numberless passages of his works in which every worthy and generous mind may recognise, with little or no change, the echo of its own high aspirations; ennobling and consoling truths, clothed in the highest beauty of imagination.

How far, or in what sense, some of the opinions above-mentioned are well founded; whether they are not combined with errors which derogate from their effect; and, above all, how their operation is likely to be qualified by the grand deficiency above alluded to, we will not inquire. We feel our incapability to weigh in a perfect scale the truth and error of his tenets, any more than the good and evil of his life,--and we most willingly resign the solemn task to wiser heads and better hearts than our own. We may however observe, that he has himself protested against the charge of Atheism (and he was not a man to disown an obnoxious opinion); that his ideas on some other subjects appear to us to have been misrepresented; and that his peculiar opinions in politics and theology, instead of being interwoven with the texture of his poems, appear rather as excrescences on the surface, disfiguring them in parts. Were a few of his minor poems, and a

small portion of each of his longer ones expunged, and the remainder published under the name of some popular writer, we venture to assert that few would be found to charge them with a mischievous tendency. It is, indeed, remarkable that the worst parts of his poems are those which are devoted to the promulga tion of the controverted points; his theory hangs like a leaden weight on his fancy*.

What Shelley was, in some points at least, we have, in the above hasty and imperfect words, delivered our opinion; what he would have been, it is now vain to inquire. We can only state your belief, that he would have developed new treasures in our language, and enriched our literature with some greater and more perfect performance, something transcending all that he had before achieved; and a conjecture not altogether gratuitous, that the troubled current of his opinions would have subsided into the calmness and depth of assured belief. Let us not compromise the dignity of truth, or the sacredness of religious principle, even in favour of those who cannot reward us; but let us think of him in the wisdom of charity, and with that feeling with which a wellconstituted mind cannot but regard the premature and sudden disappearance from the earth of the noblest of God's intellectual

creations!

We had intended to add something like a delineation of Shelley's poetical character; but we feel that the task would demand many qualifications which we do not possess. It may suffice to say, as a general description, that his element lay in the mixture of passion and imagination—the imagery being, as it were, impregnated with the passion which brooded over it. His extraordinary sensitive power overbalanced his power of reflection; he would otherwise have been even greater than he was. He wants pliancy of genius; no first-rate poet ever possessed less variety of powers; there is not merely a want of thought, but a want of human interest in his productions+. But no words can do justice to the mixed sublimity and sweetness of his images. It is as if the solid grandeur of Milton were combined with the thrilling vividness and overpowering sweetness of Jeremy Taylor. It is like the

*Such is the case in the Revolt of Islam, in the Prometheus, and above all, in the suppressed poem of Queen Mab, in which extraordinary powers of imagination and language are thrown away on a design incurably bad. Never was there a greater mistake than when the publishers of debauchery and impiety, and their imitators in America, selected this work as calculated to promote the good cause. Its merits and its defects alike disqualified it for such a purpose. Shelley was a wretched reasoner-and we could select some singular specimens of logic from this work; but we remember the verdict which he himself afterwards passed on the production of his boyhood.

We except that most powerful work, the Tragedy of the Cenci.

glory of the noontide sun, and the glory of the lightning, united in one. We have left ourselves no room to speak of his marvellous command of language, and the delicious melody of his versification; the sweetness of which would be cloying, were it not supported by a strength equally remarkable. Neither can we do much more than specify the titles of the posthumous poems now before us. They consist of Julian and Maddalo, a tale written in an ill-chosen form, but containing some powerful passages; the Witch of Atlas, a wildly luxuriant fancy-piece (the heroine of which is the prototype of our own Maïmoune ;) the Triumph of Life, a Dantesque conception, and composed in the great master's own metre; translations of the Cyclops of Euripides; Homer's Hymn to Mercury, &c.; and Miscellaneous Poems, many of them fragments; besides a reprint of Alastor. We subjoin a few slight extracts; the first is from the Witch of Atlas; the second from the Triumph of Life; the rest are extracted promiscuously.

The deep recesses of her odorous dwelling

Were stored with magic treasures-sounds of air,
Which had the power all spirits of compelling,
Folded in cells of crystal silence there ;

Such as we hear in youth, and think the feeling
Will never die—yet ere we are aware,

The feeling and the sound are fled and gone,
And the regrets they leave, remain alone.

With motion like the spirit of that wind

Whose soft step deepens slumber, her soft feet
Past through the peopled haunts of human kind,
Scattering sweet visions from her presence sweet,
Through fane, and palace-court, and labyrinth mine
With many a dark and subterraneous street
Under the Nile; through chambers high and deep
She past, observing mortals in their sleep.

A pleasure sweet, doubtless it was to see

Mortals subdued to all the shapes of sleep:

Here lay two sister-twins in infancy;

There, a lone youth, who, in his dreams did weep;
Within, two lovers linked innocently

In those loose locks which over both did creep
Like ivy from one stem,—and there lay calm,
Old age with snow-bright hair and folded palm.

Their portion of the toil, which he of old
Took as his own and then imposed on them:
But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold

Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem
The cone of night, now they were laid asleep
Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem

Which an old chesnut flung athwart the steep
Of a green Apennine: before me fled
The night; behind me rose the day; the deep

Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head,
When a strange trance over my fancy grew
Which was not slumber.

The lady died.not, nor grew wild,
But year by year lived on, in truth—I think
Herg entleness, and patience, and sad smiles,
And that she did not die, but lived to tend
Her aged father, were a kind of madness,