tions of humanity etherealized by the ideal of love which has breathed on them and burned away the grossness of matter. Alastor, though still possessing the limbs and features of a man, is weirdly inhuman and airy:

The mountaineer,

Encountering on some dizzy precipice

That spectral form, deemed that the spirit of wind,
With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet
Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused

In its career.

That shallop on the shore, long abandoned, its sides gaping wide "with many a rift" and its joints swaying "with the undulating tide," was too frail a craft to bear the weight of flesh and blood over the stormy waters of the Chorasmian deep. The immaterial spirit of a man transfigured by the power of love sat at the helm. Lionel, also, faded away, until

The blood in his translucent veins

Beat not like animal life, but love

Seemed now its sullen springs to move,
When life had failed and all its pains.

Finally, in "Prometheus Unbound" the actors are all pure spirit, ethereal and of the heavens, creatures of the soaring imagination. Prometheus, Asia, Earth, Morn, the Echoes, the Hours are airy nothings, without a local habitation, almost without a name.

A further effect was produced upon Shelley's poetry by this ethereal ideal of nature and love, an effect directly traceable to the influence which the ideal exerted upon his life. Wordsworth, quieted into a joyous calm by nature, lived a life of tranquillity and contemplation; there were no strivings and no disappointments-at least, after the despondency of his young manhood was brushed away. His days were "bound each to each by natural piety;" nothing ever disturbed his "cheerful faith" that all things are "full of blessings." It was not so with Shelley, whose entire life was a longing and yearning for his ideal. He, as I guess,

Had gazed on nature's naked loveliness,
Acteon-like; and now he fled astray

With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,
And his own thoughts along that rugged way

Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.

Consequently, instead of the placidity which marks the flow of Wordsworth's verse, there is present in Shelley's poetry an

alternation of exultation, when the ideal seems attained, and of despondency, when the evanescent form eludes his grasp. If we look beneath the allegory we shall find in Alastor, in Athanase, in Lionel the sad history of Shelley's own strivings after the ideal form of love. He believed it was found in Harriet, and as long as the delusion lasted he was happy in her. During the glad, sweet days in the cottage at Lynmouth he looked forward to a future of ardent love and pure thoughts for her and for himself. But the ideal faded; Harriet, divested of the garment of love which Shelley had thrown about her, appeared a selfish and loveless girl; then succeeds a period of despondency which seeks expression in his verse. A minor chord runs through the shorter poems of the first six months of 1814, when his hearth was cold and solitary. Then Mary, with "her brown eyes bright and clear,” wooed him once again to life and hope and gave him strength to write in prophecy "The Revolt of Islam" and the triumphs of the golden city. But when pain of body returned, and his children were taken from him, and even Mary seemed to grow cold, he was plunged again into gloom. So came into being, in 1818, the "Lines Written in the Euganean Hills," when the poet found an island "in the deep, wide sea of misery ;" and, at the close of the same year, the "Stanzas Written in Dejection," when without health or hope, beaten and buffeted by the world, he sobbed out-

Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are.

I could lie down like a tired child

And weep away the 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.

Finally, in "Epipsychidion," he tells us how he found again a human form of his ideal, to be again disheartened by a shattering of its beauty. Like Athanase and Lionel, Shelley had wedded one who seemed a radiant maiden all instinct with love and life, only in the end to suffer chilling disappointment; and like them, too, he found a heavenly being to kiss his lips and win him back to life. About the unfortunate Harriet and the

beautiful Mary he had in turn twined his affections to discover in one Pandemos and in the other the fair Urania.

It is not strange that we find, in the poetry of one who thus sought and lost and yet was ever seeking the ideal, a deep appreciation of that art which can best reflect a soul-pervading aspiration. Free from all corporeal conditions and limitations, music was specially fitted to express to the poet's mind the spiritual ideal of his heart and to convey to him, not alone the ecstasies of earthly or heavenly love, but as well the elements of pure passion, which is their foundation. Shelley's fondness for music, then, is not strange or surprising. "Music made giddy the dim brain, faint with intoxication of keen joy." He was carried away by Mozart, and drew from Constantia's song and the notes of Jane's guitar a deep satisfaction. The swelling of Miss Clairmont's rich voice produced in him a state of bliss, in which the cope of heaven seemed rent and the soul developed wings with which to follow the sublime career of the soaring song: A breathless awe, like the swift change, Unseen, but felt in youthful slumbers, Wild, sweet, but uncommunicably strange,

Thou breathest now in fast-ascending numbers.
The cope of heaven seems rent and cloven

By the enchantment of thy strain,

And on my shoulders wings are woven,

To follow its sublime career

Beyond the mighty moons that wane

Upon the verge of nature's utmost sphere,

Till the world's shadowy walls are passed and disappear.

Similarly he recognizes in later lyrics, and in short lines in the longer poems, this power of music to carry one above the noises of earth to the serenc heights of spiritual intoxication.

Moreover, this ethereal ideal of nature and love which had such a marked effect on Shelley's life, and thus indirectly on his poetry, exerted as strong an influence on his poems directly. It purified them of the fleshly dross and gave them a sublimely spiritual texture. The ideal affected Shelley's verse in much the same way as Alastor's knowledge affected his dreams. "Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his imaginations unites all of wonderful or wise or beautiful which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture." "The Ode to the West

Wind" and "The Sensitive Plant" display this spiritual richness and prove themselves to be the songs of an Ariel, while the elegy on Keats is the threnody of a spirit concerning a spirit. There is nothing mortal or material about Adonais.

He is made one with nature. There is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan

Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird.
He is a presence to be felt and known

In darkness and in light

made spirit by gazing on the form of nature's loveliness. Shelley was enabled to catch, better than any other of our poets, the subtle and fleeting graces that belong to evanescent forms of things, to states of mind and of the imagination. All the visible scenes of nature entered unawares into his heart and became for him ideal rather than real. Similarly he drew most exquisite sensuous pleasure from material things, but a pleasure that is spiritually sensuous:

And from the moss, violets and jonquils peep
And dart their arrowy odor through the brain,
Till you might faint with that delicious pain;

while from the bells of the hyacinth he heard sweet peals
Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,

It was felt like an odor within the sense.

In like manner he pierced behind the veil of mortal limitations and felt the glories of past but not forgotten days, and buoyantly rode upon the waves of purely spiritual emotion. Spiritualized, etherealized by the power of his ideal, he took things of sense-material things-and transmuted them into evanescent and fleeting essences of cloud and air and spirit. Well, indeed, did Trelawny inscribe upon his tomb, beneath Leigh Hunt's "Cor cordium," the Ariel song from "The Tempest "—

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.

William C. Imper.

ART. IV. THE SOCIAL PROBLEM.

Is there a social problem? That is to say, is it worth while to perplex ourselves about methods of effecting a more equitable division of the fruits of human industry? Can it be secured? The question is not a frivolous one, nor does it imply any sarcasm. For, strictly speaking, orthodox political economy teaches us that a social problem relative to distribution is as absurd as a social problem about gravitation. The product of human industry is portioned out to the several groups of producers by natural laws. There is no power in society to change these allotments. Each man gets just what belongs to him; he cannot get either more or less. There may, indeed, be fraud in exchange, and contracts may be violated. But in these cases the problem is one of morals or of legislation to enjoin contracts; but the division of the product of organized or agricultural industries is assigned to the different partners by inexorable laws.

Such is the dogma of economic science. It follows from it that there is no injustice to do away with by reform, no wrongs of labor, no encroachments of capital. The devout soul, recognizing natural laws as the will of a benevolent Creator and accepting this economic dogma, must declare that the actual division of the fruits of industry is equitable and just. In much of the discussion between the economist and the philanthropic reformer the economic dogma is misunderstood or misapplied; and it may, therefore, be worth while, as a step toward more equitable discussion, to answer with some care the question, "Is there a social problem?" This present attempt to make reply will drop out of view the extensive literature of the subject and take up the question, so to say, on its merits. Our brief study may be helped to a clear issue by recalling at once, by the side of the economic dogma, the answer to it made by the philanthropic reformer. He affirms that the so-called laws of nature in economics are not natural, but historical, products. The rent of the landlord, the interest of the capitalist, the profits of the manufacturer, are all growths of human history. Each of them involves abuses impiously consecrated by society. This system of industry, with the wage-earner at the bottom and entitled