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wail of his desolation there are many tones wild and weird, some defiant, some full of desponding pathos.

The Lines written in Dejection, on the Bay of Naples, in 1818, are perhaps the most touching of all his wails, the words are so sweet, they seem, by their very sweetness, to lighten the load of heart-loneliness :

"I see the Deep's untrampled floor

With green and purple seaweeds strown;

I see the waves upon the shore,

Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:

I sit upon the sands alone;

The lightning of the noon-tide ocean

Is flashing round me, and a tone

Arises from its measured motion,

How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

'Alas! I have nor hope, nor health,

Nor peace within, nor calm around,
Nor that content, surpassing wealth,
The sage in meditation found.

"Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away this life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear,

Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea

Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony."

Who that reads these sighing lines but must feel for the heart that breathed them! Yet how can we be surprised that he should have felt so desolate? Every heart needs some stay. And a heart so keen, a spirit so finely touched, as Shelley's, needed, far more than narrow and unsympathetic natures, a refuge amid the storms of life. But he knew of none. His universe

His

was a homeless one; it had no centre of repose. universal essence of love, diffused throughout it, con

tained nothing substantial

and support his own.

no will that could control While a soul owns no law, is

without awe, lives wholly by impulse, what rest, what central peace, is possible for it? When the ardors of emotion have died down, what remains for it, but weakness, exhaustion, despair? The feeling of his weakness awoke in Shelley no brokenness of spirit, no self-abasement, no reverence. Nature was to him really the whole, and he saw in it nothing but "a revelation of death, a sepulchral picture, generation after generation disappearing, and being heard of and seen no more." He rejected utterly that other "consolatory revelation which tells us that we are spiritual beings, and have a spiritual source of life" and strength, above and beyond the material system. Such a belief, or rather no belief, as his, can engender only infinite sadness, infinite despair. And this is the deep undertone of all Shelley's poetry.

Yet even

I have dwelt on his lyrics because they contain little of the questionable elements which here and there obtrude themselves in the longer poems. And one may speak of these lyrics without agitating too deeply questions which at present I would rather avoid. the lyrics bear some impress of the source whence they come. Beautiful though they be, they are like those fine pearls which, we are told, are the products of disease in the parent shell. All Shelley's poetry is, as it were, a gale blown from a richly dowered but not healthy land; and the taint, though not so perceptible in the lyrics, still hangs more or less over many of the finest. Besides this defect, they are very limited in

their range of influence. They cannot reach the hearts of all men. They fascinate only some of the educated, and that probably only while they are young. The time comes when these pass out of that peculiar sphere of thought, and find little interest in such poetry. Probably the rare exquisiteness of their workmanship will always preserve Shelley's lyrics, even after the world has lost, as we may hope it will lose, sympathy with their substance. But better, stronger, more vital far are those lyrics which lay hold on the permanent, unchanging emotions of man those emotions which all healthy natures have felt, and always will feel, and which no new deposit of thought or of civilization can ever bury out of sight.

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CHAPTER IX.

THE POETRY OF THE SCOTTISH

OSSIAN.

HIGHLANDS.

Ir was towards the end of August when I bethought me of my Oxford audience, and of what I should say when next I met them. Around me was the flush of the heather on all the braes; before me the autumn lights and shadows were trailing over the higher Bens. With the power of the hills thus upon him, who could turn to books? It seemed impossible for me to fix on any subject which was not in keeping with the sights on which my eyes were resting the while.

And then I thought of the countless throng of strangers from England and from all lands, who at that moment were crowding all the tourist thoroughfares of the Highlands, visiting the usual lochs and glens, and climbing, perhaps, some of the more famous mountains. And I could not but feel how rarely any one of these penetrates beyond the mere shell of what he sees, or gets a glimpse into the heart of that mountain vision which passes before him. It cannot be that they should. They hurry for a week or ten days, which are all they have leisure for, along the beaten tracks; they catch from the deck of a crowded steamer or the top of a stage coach, rapid views of mountains, moors, and sea-lochs, which may for a moment please the eye and refresh the spirit. But it is not thus that the mountain solitudes render up their secret, and melt into the heart.

A momentary glance at the pine woods of Rothiemurchus, and the granite cliffs of the Cairngorm, snatched from a flying railway-train is better than Cheapside; that is all. Even those more fortunate ones who can pass a month at a shooting lodge in some Highland glen, or by some blue sea-loch, are for the most part so absorbed in grouse-killing or deer-stalking, that they have seldom eye or ear for anything beside.

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Those only have a chance of knowing what the real Highlands are who go with hearts at leisure to see and to feel, and who "go all alone the while; some adventurous wanderer, who has had the gentle hardihood to leave the crowded tourist-paths, with their steamers and hotels, and setting his face, unattended, to the wilderness, has been content to shelter for nights together beneath some huge boulder-stone, or in a cave, or under the roof of crofter, keeper, or shepherd; or some deerstalker who has lain for hours in the balloch or hill-pass, waiting till the antlered stag came by; or the grouseshooter, who, when wearied with a whole day's walking, has sat down towards evening on some western hillside, and watched the sun going down to the Atlantic Isles. At such seasons the traveller and the sportsman, while his eye went dreaming over the dusky waste, and ear and heart were awake to receive the lonely sounds of the desert, and to let these, and the great silence that encompasses them, melt into his being; at such seasons it was, that he perhaps became aware how vast a world of unuttered poetry lies all dumb in those great wildernesses poetry of which the best words of the best poets, who have essayed to give voice to it, are but a poor, inadequate echo.

Some features of that country's scenery, and some

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