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they could be content with a "mean and jocular human life in his poetry. He was an abstract student, anxious about deep philosophies; and he had not that settled, contemplative, allotted acquaintance with external nature which is so curious in Milton, the greatest of studious poets. The exact opposite, however, to Shelley, in the nature of his sensibility, is Keats. That great poet used to pepper his tongue, "to enjoy in all its grandeur the cool flavor of delicious claret:" when you know it, you seem to read it in his poetry, - there is the same luxurious sentiment, the same poise on fine sensation. Shelley was the reverse of this: he was a water-drinker; his verse runs quick and chill, like a pure crystal stream. The sensibility of Keats was attracted too by the spectacle of the universe: he could not keep his eye from seeing or his ears from hearing the glories of it; all the beautiful objects of nature reappear by name in his poetry. On the other hand, the abstract idea of beauty is forever celebrated in Shelley; it haunted his soul: but it was independent of special things, it was the general surface of beauty which lies upon all things. It was the smile of the universe and the expression of the world it was not the vision of a land of corn and wine. The nerves of Shelley quivered at the idea of loveliness, but no coarse sensation obtruded particular objects upon him; he was left to himself with books and reflection.

So far, indeed, from Shelley having a peculiar tendency to dwell on and prolong the sensation of pleasure, he has a perverse tendency to draw out into lingering keenness the torture of agony. Of his common recurrence to the dizzy pain of mania we have formerly spoken; but this is not the only pain. The nightshade is commoner in his poems than the daisy. The nerve is ever laid bare; as often as it touches the open air of the real world, it quivers

*Our life . . . is common and mean.' "Man the Reformer."

with subtle pain. The high intellectual impulses which animated him are too incorporeal for human nature they begin in buoyant joy, they end in eager suffering.

In style, said Mr. Wordsworth, in workmanship, we think his expression was, -Shelley is one of the best of us. This too, we think, was the second of the peculiarities to which Lord Macaulay referred when he said that Shelley had, more than any recent poet, some of the qualities of the great old masters. The peculiarity of his style is its intellectuality; and this strikes us the more from its contrast with his impulsiveness. He had something of this in life: hurried away by sudden desires as he was in his choice of ends, we are struck with a certain comparative measure and adjustment in his choice of means. So in his writings: over the most intense excitement, the grandest objects, the keenest agony, the most buoyant joy, he throws an air of subtle mind. His language is minutely and acutely searching; at the dizziest height of meaning the keenness of the words is greatest. As in mania, so in his descriptions of it, the acuteness of the mind seems to survive the mind itself. It was from Plato and Sophocles, doubtless, that he gained the last perfection in preserving the accuracy of the intellect when treating of the objects of the imagination; but in its essence it was a peculiarity of his own nature. As it was the instinct of Byron to give in glaring words the gross phenomena of evident objects, so it was that of Shelley to refine the most inscrutable with the curious nicety of an attenuating metaphysician; in the wildest of ecstasies his self-anatomizing intellect is equal to itself.

There is much more which might be said, and which ought to be said, of Shelley; but our limits are reached. We have not attempted a complete criticism we have only aimed to show how some of the peculiarities of his works and life may be traced to the peculiarity of his nature.

BÉRANGER. *
(1857.)

THE invention of books has at least one great advantage it has half abolished one of the worst consequences of the diversity of languages. Literature enables nations to understand one another; oral intercourse hardly does this. In English a distinguished foreigner says not what he thinks, but what he can. There is a certain intimate essence of national meaning which is as untranslatable as good poetry. Dry thoughts are cosmopolitan; but the delicate associations of language which express character, the traits of speech which mark the man, differ in every tongue, so that there are not even cumbrous circumlocutions that are equivalent in another. National character is a deep thing, -a shy thing; you cannot exhibit much of it to people who have a difficulty in understanding your language: you are in strange society, and you feel you will not be understood.

"Let an English gentleman," writes Mr. Thackeray, "who has dwelt two, four, or ten years in Paris, say, at the end of any given period, how much he knows of French society, how many French houses he has entered, and how many French friends he has made? Intimacy there is none; we see but the outsides of the people. Year by year we live in France, and grow gray and see no

*Euvres complètes de C.-J. de Béranger. Nouvelle édition revue par l'Auteur, contenant les Dix Chansons nouvelles, le facsimile d'une Lettre de Béranger; illustrée de cinquante-deux gravures sur acier, d'après Charlet, D'Aubigny, Johannot, Grenier, De Lemud, Pauquet, Penguilly, Raffet, Sandoz, exécutées par les artistes les plus distingués, et d'un beau portrait d'après nature par Sandoz. 2 vols. 8vo.

1855.

more. We play écarté with Monsieur de Trêfle every night; but what do we know of the heart of the man - of the inward ways, thoughts, and customs of Trêfle? We have danced with Countess Flicflac, Tuesdays and Thursdays, ever since the peace; and how far are we advanced in her acquaintance since we first twirled her. round a room? We know her velvet gown and her diamonds; we know her smiles, and her simpers, and her rouge: but the real, rougeless, intime Flicflac we know not."*

Even if our words did not stutter (as they do stutter) on our tongue, she would not tell us what she is. Literature has half mended this. Books are exportable; the essence of national character lies flat on a printed page. Men of genius with the impulses of solitude produce works of art, whose words can be read and reread and partially taken in by foreigners to whom they could never be uttered, the very thought of whose unsympathizing faces would freeze them on the surface of the mind.

Alexander Smith has accused poetical reviewers of beginning as far as possible from their subject. It may seem to some, though it is not so really, that we are exemplifying this saying in commencing as we have commenced an article on Béranger.

There are two kinds of poetry, which one may call poems of this world and poems not of this world. We see a certain society on the earth, held together by certain relations, performing certain acts, exhibiting certain phenomena, calling forth certain emotions. The millions of human beings who compose it have their various thoughts, feelings, and desires. They hate, act, and live. The social bond presses them closely together; and from their proximity new sentiments arise, which are half superficial and do not touch the inmost soul, but which nevertheless are unspeakably important in the actual constitution of

*We have been obliged to abridge the above extract, and in so doing have left out the humor of it.-B. [From the "Paris Sketch Book"; condensed from the section "On Some French Fashionable Novels." — ED.]

human nature, and work out their effects for good and for evil on the characters of those who are subjected to their influence. These sentiments of the world, as one may speak, differ from the more primitive impulses and emotions of our inner nature as the superficial phenomena of the material universe from what we fancy is its real essence. Passing hues, transient changes have their course before our eyes; a multiplex diorama is forever displayed; underneath it all we fancy-such is the inevitable constitution of our thinking faculty — a primitive immovable essence, which is modified into all the ever-changing phenomena we see, which is the gray granite whereon they lie, the primary substance whose débris they all are. Just so from the original and primitive emotions of man, society-the evolving capacity of combined actionbrings out desires which seem new, in a sense are new; which have no existence out of the society itself, are colored by its customs at the moment, change with the fashions of the age. Such a principle is what we may call social gayety: the love of combined amusement which all men feel and variously express, and which is to the higher faculties of the soul what a gay running stream is to the everlasting mountain, -a light, altering element which beautifies while it modifies. Poetry does not shrink from expressing such feelings; on the contrary, their renovating cheerfulness blends appropriately with her inspiriting delight. Each age and each form of the stimulating imagination has a fashion of its own. Sir Walter sings in

his modernized chivalry :

"Waken, lords and ladies gay:

On the mountain dawns the day;

All the jolly chase is here,

With hawk and horse and hunting spear!
Hounds are in their couples yelling,

Hawks are whistling, horns are knelling,

Merrily, merrily mingle they,

'Waken, lords and ladies gay!'