of the poetic power he yet felt constrained to exert ; hungry always for words and looks of understanding; he has left us his testimony touching each of these common sorrows. Of the imperfectness of life he wrote:

"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments. — Die

If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!"

Of the struggle for expression:

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"Woe is me!

The wingéd words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of love's rare Universe

Are chains of lead around its flight of fire."

And again: "The most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet." And of the inadequacy of human love:

"O Love! who bewailest

The frailty of all things here,

Why choose you the frailest

For your cradle, your home and your bier ?"

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Shelley's own thought of himself as poet and reformer is set forth in the following extract from a letter of December 11, 1817, to Godwin, concerning Laon and Cythna, or The Revolt of Islam: "I felt that it was in many respects a genuine picture of my own mind. I felt that the sentiments were true, not assumed. And in this have I long believed that my power consists in sympathy, and that part of the imagination which relates to sympathy and contemplation. I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole. Of course I

believe these faculties, which perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist very imperfectly in my own mind. . . . I cannot but be conscious, in much of what I write, of an absence of that tranquillity which is the attribute and accompaniment of power. If I live, or if I see any trust in coming years, doubt not that I shall do something, whatever it may be, which a serious and earnest estimate of my powers will suggest to me, and which will be in every respect accommodated to their utmost limits." Godwin need not have doubted, for Shelley was not born both to pass away until he had uttered his masterpiece, a revelation and a prophecy. Alastor, too, Julian and Maddalo, and Adonais, have peculiar value as presenting self-delineations of the poet's mind, while in the exquisite song of the Fourth Spirit in the Prometheus we get something of the instinct and joy of the creative faculty that upbore him in those great moments for which he paid in the pain and sorrow of gray intervals: —

"On a poet's lips I slept

Dreaming like a love-adept

In the sound his breathing kept;
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,

But feeds on the aërial kisses

Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.
He will watch from dawn to gloom

The lake-reflected sun illume

The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,

Nor heed nor see what things they be;

But from these create he can

Forms more real than living man,

Nurslings of immortality."

It remains to speak of Shelley's distinctive style, which is, of course, one always in point of word-lore, musical keenness, vivified sensibility, acceleration, yet it is separable into the lyric manner, the dramatic, the satiric, and the polemic. In the lyric Shelley is most surely himself, striking through to the secret of his feeling with quick penetra

tion, and singing out his emotion exultantly, as in The Cloud; or mournfully, as in Stanzas written in Dejection; or both, as in Epipsychidion; yet in all with an astonishing anticipativeness. It is a singing at its happiest like the shrill delight of his own skylark, or the careless rapture of Browning's thrush, bird-like in both its trilling echoes and its swift-flung ritornelles; in its quiet caressing of a single note, as "dædal or "multitudinous," and in the flooding harmonies of its finale. And here it should be said that Shelley's endings are among his greatest poetic victories over the clogs of expression, whether in the lyricbuilt drama, Prometheus, with which he could not rest content until he had added a fourth act of hope and gladness; or in the magnificently sustained pæan of Eternity with which Adonais breaks off its music; or in the lingering promise-refrains of the Ode to the West Wind and the apostrophes to Jane. Yet this is not true of all of his work, some of which, in its sheer lyric abandon, is overcareless of the oracle that "truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself." In the sonnet form, particularly, Shelley is less successful, possibly because his repugnance to even a literary law that did not immediately commend itself to his art sense may have disturbed his pen's ease and power. Certainly, he was careless here of the canons, and seems to have had scant appreciation of the self-justifying genius of this difficult but finely subtle form. Even so, one cannot but be grateful that Shelley needed no salvation from the vice of fastidiousness. It is possible to fail in art, as Browning writes, "only to succeed in highest art."

Something of the same unease in technique appears in the dramas, Hellas, Prometheus, and The Cenci, of which only the last-named is, in the traditional sense, a contribution to drama proper. I have used of the Prometheus the term " lyric-built," for Shelley's utterance is always essentially lyrical, and so indeed is his point of view. By this is meant that he is chiefly interested in reproducing

his own emotions in song, — emotions touching past deaths and persecutions, present pleasures and sorrows, and ideal aspirations toward a World-Cause he too often felt as silent and remote. He wrote - in its highest sense-personal poetry. His characteristic work is never horizontal: when exultant it shoots upward; when dejected it plunges downward. It has no merely craftsmanlike propriety. Of the craft of the dramatist, indeed, he knew little either by experience or by reflection, though his critical vision showed him the meaning of the dramatic idea so plainly that his statement of it in the preface to The Cenci is among the best we have. "The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama," he writes, "is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself; in proportion to the possession of which knowledge every human being is wise, just, sincere, tolerant, and kind." And again: "In a dramatic composition the imagery and the passion should interpenetrate one another, the former being reserved for the full development and illustration of the latter. Imagination is as the immortal God which should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal passion. It is true that the most remote and the most familiar imagery may alike be fit for dramatic purposes when employed in the illustration of strong feeling, which raises what is low, and levels to the apprehension that which is lofty, casting over all the shadow of its own greatness.” The Cenci itself, though an actable play by virtue of its many sharply striking and challenging antitheses between the incarnated spirits of good and evil, its fidelity to tragic "pity and terror," and its general conformity to the prime structural conditions of drama, is yet rather modern than critically orthodox in its literary tendencies. The last act, it is true, equals in nobility of diction the nobility of its passion; emphasizes the art value of reserve; is finely selective; and not once, it seems, falls into the tiresome mire of Commonplace, a success only partially achieved in the acts preceding.

In these, powerful as they are, Shelley strangely strikes a few notes of undeniable flatness, his novitiate in drama, perhaps, in the less inspirational moments, intimidating him. The play as a whole tends, like Hellas and the Prometheus, toward closet drama. Though The Cenci is more immediately forceful than Browning's plays in general, yet the Prometheus is even farther away from the stage and stagecraft than Hardy's Dynasts, one of the most extreme instances in modern English drama of the closet play. In any case, the direction of the dramatic spirit of to-day is toward mind-enactment. We are beginning to suspect playhouse plausibility, and to feel that personal Forests of Arden are better for us than any staged presentation can possibly be. The normal man, no doubt, even in a cultured community, will find in a carefully staged performance value for both his conscience and his fancy; yet, as the progress of the race is steadily away from the objective to the subjective (precisely as Shakespeare's progress was from the frankly concrete figures of the early comedies to Hamlet and The Tempest, neither of which plays can achieve on the stage a success commensurate with its spiritual power), it is natural that closet drama is becoming more and more persistent, and that we should have come to feel as well as to admit that the theatre is only an incident — however important in the development of the drama, and that a play is not great first of all because it is actable. Shelley, for his part, felt this very keenly. "With the exception of Fazio," 1 wrote Peacock, "I do not remember his having been pleased with any performance at an English theatre." In his Defence of Poetry he discusses at some length the history of the dramatic idea and the weakness of the modern stage. His own plays, given their appropriate background, will not fail of their social and spiritual appeal.

Of his satiric and polemic verse but little need be said. Though keen and animated, it does not convince, because 1 By Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868).