unreal projection of human thought and fancy. Responsive as he is to every sensuous impression, and eager to trace the course of human destiny in the symbolic aspects of nature, he yet characteristically regards all natural phenomena as vital in themselves and for themselves, understanding man no less than understood by him, honouring their own dignity as members of the spiritual economy of the universe, and calmer and truer in their movement toward destiny than the mortals who live among them in alternating fits of love and cruelty, of fear and hope. Into their spiritual brotherhood the illumined may gain access, but only on terms of purity and unselfishness. What they reveal to such is revealed for the large sake of all, not for the little, local gain of a wandering human. Nature and man are tending toward the high estate of perfect love, and each will be the better for the other's understanding friendship. Prometheus, the ideal of Man, and Asia, transfigured Nature, will at length become united in one being, that Light of which the poet sings in Adonais

whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst."

It will thus be seen that Shelley is at one with the romantic temper of his age in ascribing to nature a spiritual quality and significance, and in regarding man's life as symbolic and progressive; but he goes beyond Romanticism-Wordsworthian Romanticism at least in his idea of the vigorously dynamic life of nature, an idea he holds in common with modern physicists, save that with him nature is almost everywhere apotheosized. Wordsworth, though he informed. nature with intense spiritual meaning, yet saw it in familiar images and in rather still habitudes. Even at its highest,

nature in his work is somewhat domesticized, at least localized, in tinge, and is often comparatively hushed and stationary. Where it moves and energizes it does so slowly, and within limits. In brief, its tone is the tone of the phenomenal tenanted in time by the Eternal, rather than that of a rushing mighty wind. To Wordsworth nature is the garment of the Eternal; to Shelley, its movement. Shelley makes his pictures less pictures than actional prophecies. Arethusa leaps down the rocks, the Night swiftly walks over the western wave, the skylark pants forth a flood of rapture, the West Wind is a wild spirit moving everywhere, and "Follow! Follow!" cry the echoing Voices to Panthea and Asia in the Prometheus. The very mythological largeness of many of his nature-conceptions-Greek in body but intensely modern and fervent in spirit gives them a power that stirs and draws even usually unemotional readers. His poetry illustrates one of his own cardinal doctrines as critic, it "compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know."

For Shelley is nearly always a coursing poet. There is sun in his work, and wind and storm. An "enemy of society," he was yet an anxious lover and reformer of mankind. Against occasional laws he rebelled, considering only the laws of the spirit to be binding and immutable. He was always a Platonist in temper, and early became one also by conviction. All that man needs, he thought, is freedom to think and to act. Granted relief from fear and tyranny, he cannot fail to come out into the light of love. His instinct will lead him if he will but trust it, for it is not blind, but is made purposeful by the Power, the Spirit, that helps all things finally to realize themselves in love. Man has been shamefully abused, drugged, made mad, by oppression, selfishness, and dread. Let him become himself

"Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,

Whose nature is its own divine control,

Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;

Familiar acts are beautiful through love;

Labour, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove

Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be!

"His will, with all mean passions, bad delights,

And selfish cares, its trembling satellites,
A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey,

Is as a tempest-winged ship, whose helm

Love rules through waves which dare not overwhelm,
Forcing life's wildest shores to own its sovereign sway.

"The lightning is his slave; heaven's utmost deep
Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep
They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on!
The tempest is his steed, he strides the air;

And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare :

'Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.'"

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In order to clear man's way for him Shelley discovers not only his internal foes, but also the external enemies which encourage these, King and Priest. Against political and ecclesiastical tyrants he lifts up a burning voice, in his Ode to Liberty, Revolt of Islam, Prometheus, and The Cenci. Here he is at one with the most ardent spirits of the modern revolutionary era, though in point of patience1 he had much to learn. It seemed to Shelley that personal prosperity and content meant nearly always a selfish blindness to the woes of others; it seemed to him that the world at large was in the grip of baneful and intolerable custom; that men were smugly and fatuously wearing shackles that not only hampered their movements but corroded their very souls; and that all that was necessary to their deliverance was acceptance of the spirit of love in place of the dictates of

1 In matters intimately affecting himself, however, Shelley sometimes showed extraordinary long-suffering. Note the mildness of the following rebuke in a letter to James Ollier, his publisher: "Mr. Gisborne has sent me a copy of the Prometheus, which is certainly most beautifully printed. It is to he regretted that the errors of the press are so numerous, and in many respects so destructive of the sense of a species of poetry which, I fear, even without this disadvantage, very few will understand or like."

what they called law,1 a willingness to see and assume mankind's heritage of freedom of soul, and a determination no longer to submit to the whims and wilfulnesses of self-constituted exploiters. In brief, Shelley was a thorough-going Radical in thought, in teaching, and in deed, though a many-sided one. He was wholesomely earnest in his desire for the world's betterment, yet he was, in his personal relations, sometimes strangely insensitive in his very sensitiveness. He was hardly willing that men should encounter and overthrow tyranny with its own weapons, and yet he was deeply impatient of their long hesitation to be free. If Wordsworth was a priest of Liberty, and Byron its soldier, Shelley rather was its young prophet, who brooded, and promised, and exhorted, and lamented, in turn.

Too often his poetry struck the note of grief at the listlessness and insufficiency of human life. It is interesting to note with what unrest he time after time contrasts life with death, the waking consciousness with sleep. Indeed, there are few of the romantic poets who are not moved to noble utterance on these twin themes. In Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, such references recur again and again. For the sleep-experience, it seems to the poet, provides for him a way of escape from the weaknesses and wrongs of mortality, rescues him from his own and his fellows' littleness, gives his imagination the right and the power to assert its mastery and go on its unchecked adventure. So, too, as in sleep he dies to the world of fact, from sleep he rises with enlarged horizon, with cleared and refreshed spirit.

"Every morning we are born: every night we die."

1 In his Essay on Christianity, Shelley writes: "This, and no other, is justice : -to consider, under all the circumstances of a particular case, how the greatest quantity and purest quality of happiness will ensue from any action; [this] is to be just, and there is no other justice. The distinction between justice and mercy was first imagined in the courts of tyranny. Mankind receive every relaxation of their tyranny as a circumstance of grace or favour."

If sleep can so serve him, how, he asks himself, shall not death also serve him, only more greatly? For death, it seems, must gather into itself all the meanings and benedictions of sleep. Shelley touches these ideas with a more delicate and lingering sympathy than does any other. We find their rising and falling music in Queen Mab, the opening chorus in Hellas, Mutability, To Night, Adonais, Stanzas written in Dejection, and in these lettered words concerning the English burying-place at Rome: "To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people, who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind, and so it peoples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion." The figures under which Shelley broods upon the thoughts of sleep and death are among the gentlest and truest in the whole range of his shining imagery.

A rising and falling music, it was said, -tinged often with melancholy. But this melancholy is not to be confounded with pessimism. It is the melancholy of art and artists, a principle that has persisted in Teutonic literatures especially, from the time of the Saxon sagas to our own day. Its roots, perhaps, are three: recognition of the incompleteness of human life; inability to express a thought or truth with the sheer first power of that thought or truth; and failure to secure more than a very slight share of the responsive sympathy of men and women. The poet is baffled at every turn by these "Thus far's,"even though he fight the better for them, — the limitation of life, the limitation of language, the limitation of love. Shelley felt them all acutely. Himself hindered by himself, he looked forward the more eagerly to the emancipation of mankind; in his later days deeply doubtful- save in brief moments