poems is not, strictly speaking, natural scenery. It is scenery whose elements are, of course, taken from nature; but these are magnified and brought together in novel combinations, with the purpose, not so much of reproducing or suggesting nature as of reflecting or symbolizing the poet's feelings, or of forming a suitable background for them. Not that Shelley always does this; he can also bring before us vivid pictures of actual nature, a gift which belonged to all the great poets of his time. But here he has his own special sphere. The aspects of nature which he excels in rendering are those, as Mr. Stopford Brooke has pointed out, of a vast, indefinite, or changeful character, the scenery of the sky, of storm and cloud, of sunset and sunrise, or of wide landscapes like that "which the poet in Alastor looks upon from the edge of a mountain precipice." He delighted in scenery reflected in the water; the softened, impalpable, and suggestive character of the image, as compared with the scene of which it is the reflection, is analogous to the difference between the ideal and the actual.

In another and very different way, Shelley introduces nature in his poetry. There is a stage in the development of the race in which men commonly conceive all active things in the world as beings with a conscious life of their own. This is the mythopoeic tendency which plays so important a part in early religion and fable. As men advance, the faculty for so conceiving things falls into abeyance. More profound and philosophic theories as to the forces which we see about us, displace this simple method of accounting for the universe. But in children the old tendency remains; we see it strikingly illustrated in the story of a poet's childhood, which Browning tells in Sordello. Shelley, who was childlike in so many respects, in his impetuosity, simplicity, and ignorance of the world, and who had no sense of the immanence of a personal force manifesting itself

in all the phenomena of the universe, possessed this mythopœic faculty to a degree unparalleled among later poets. Instead of using nature as a basis for meditation on human life · or as a medium to reflect his own moods, instead of seeing in its phenomena, as does Wordsworth, the workings of one divine being, Shelley is frequently content, for the nonce, to look upon various objects in nature as independent beings, each leading its own conscious life. He sympathizes with such an entity, and describes its imaginary experiences, as another poet might enter into and describe the life of a fellow-man. He does this in The Cloud, in Arethusa, and repeatedly in the Prometheus, in the case of such characters as "The Earth" and "The Moon." Perhaps the most extreme case of the exercise of this faculty is that afforded by The Witch of Atlas, where he describes, not the personification of an abstract quality or of a natural object, but a purely fanciful being. In this poem he finds pleasure in his own creations without desire to bring them to bear upon human life, or to give them anything which ordinary men would call a meaning.

As the peculiarities of Shelley's mind and temperament leave their impress upon the general character of the substance of his writings, so they determine the peculiarities of his form and style. His defective grasp of the concrete and real is unfavorable to the structure of his poems. His stories lack narrative force; his thought, consecutive development. This is one of the reasons why he is less successful in his longer and more ambitious works. Further, the abstract ideas which he conveys in most of these longer poems do not lend themselves to the concrete expression which poetry demands. Accordingly, he almost necessarily resorts to allegory and symbolism, as is illustrated by Alastor and Prometheus; and allegory and symbolism chill the normal reader. In the men and women of Romeo and Juliet or of

Hamlet we are naturally interested; they are creatures like ourselves. But it is only by an effort that we can overcome our initial distaste for the personified abstractions of the Prometheus.

As to his expression in a narrower sense, add to what we have already noted in Shelley's mental constitution, an extraordinarily lavish endowment of specifically poetic gifts, —skill in language, imagery, and versification,—we have the main factors in his style. We do not expect in him the qualities which arise from untiring self-criticism, from respect to the accepted canons of poetic art, such as we find in a workman like Tennyson. Shelley writes under the influence of the poetic afflatus. He is content if he gives expression to his feelings and ideas, without being careful to note occasional defects in logical structure, in grammatical concord, in congruity of images, in the regularity of his prosody. Here, as in more practical matters, he sometimes lacks selfrestraint. He does not sufficiently condense; he is carried on by the flow of language and imagery until thought is obscured or lost in musical words. But amends are made for occasional faults of this character by a spontaneous felicity, an unsought and unconventional grace to which a more conscious and less ardent artist could not have attained. This happiness is perhaps most easily noted in versification. As the unimaginative spirit will fail to appreciate Shelley's poetry in general, so will the pedantic student of metre who depends upon his fingers and his rules, fail to appreciate the subtle and varied music of Shelley's lines.

As to this and other matters in regard to his style, we cannot do better than quote the words of Professor Baynes: 1 "This uncritical negligence, the want of minute accuracy in the details of his verse, seems to us intimately connected

1 Edinburgh Review, April, 1871; quoted in Mr. Forman's Preface to his edition of Shelley.

with the whole character of Shelley's mind, and especially with the lyrical sweep and intensity of his poetical genius. He had an intellect of the rarest delicacy and analytical strength, that intuitively perceived the most remote analogies and discriminated with spontaneous precision the finest shades of sensibility, the subtilest differences of perception and emotion. He possessed a swift, soaring, and prolific imagination, that clothed every thought and feeling with imagery in the moment of its birth and instinctively read the spiritual meanings of material symbols. His fineness of sense was so exquisite that eye and ear and touch became, as it were, organs and inlets, not merely of sensitive apprehension, but of intellectual beauty and ideal truth. Every nerve in his slight but vigorous frame seemed to vibrate in unison with the deeper life of nature in the world around him, and, like the wandering harp, he was swept to music by every breath of material beauty, every gust of poetic emotion. Above all, he had a strength of intellectual passion and a depth of ideal sympathy that in moments of excitement fused all the powers of his mind into a continuous stream of creative energy, and gave the stamp of something like inspiration to all the higher productions of his muse. His very method of composition reflects these characteristics of his mind. He seems to have been urged by a sort of irresistible impulse to write, and displayed a vehement and passionate absorption in the work that recalls the old traditions of poetical frenzy and divine possession. His conceptions crowded so thickly upon him, were embodied in such exquisite verbal forms, and so enriched by illustrations flashed from remote and multiplied centres of association that while the fever lasted his whole nature was carried impetuously forward on a full tide of mingled music and imagery. From this exuberance of poetical power some of his critics have reproached him with accumulating image upon image, without pausing

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to select, discriminate, or contrast them. And it is no doubt true that there are passages in which metaphors and similes are heaped upon each other in almost dazzling profusion. But even in his most opulent and ornate descriptions there is hardly a trace of conscious labor or deliberate effort. . . . His finest passages have a witchery of aerial music, an exquisiteness of ideal beauty, and a white intensity of spiritual passion. . But the very qualities of mind and heart out of which these perfections spring carry with them the conditions of relative imperfections in the minor details of his work. The lyrical depth and impetuosity of feeling which carries Shelley on and gives such freedom and grace to the poetical movements of his kindled thought is unfavorable to perfect smoothness and accuracy in the mechanical details of his verse. He was often, in fact, too completely absorbed in the glorious substance of his poetry to give any minute attention to subordinate points of form. Thus, although from native fineness of ear his lines are never unrhythmical, the rhyme is often defective, and sometimes the metre as well. And, while his thought, even in its most subtle requirements, is always lucid, the expression, from haste or extreme condensation, is sometimes far from being clear."