of the Solitary is idealized from his friend Beaupuis, the Frenchman, is a question which a careful psychological analysis might determine. He has declared himself that The Happy Warrior was suggested by his own brother John, the sea-captain, who was a philosopher and a poet in his own fashion while he reposed from his business in the great waters. I think Leonard in The Brothers is taken from the same model. He has confessed that Ruth is drawn after the character and story of an American lady whom he knew. But they are all, at the same time, so highly idealized, that it is difficult and requires effort to recognize the originals from the lineaments of the poetic pictures.

Not the less, however, is Wordsworth to be valued as an exhibitor of character because his range is limited and his selection of the purest and the best. . . . He has conferred a benefit upon literature in idealizing men, even as he has idealized nature, from a few familiar examples, not from the complex varieties of the whole. He has taken his images from his own hills, and vales, and warbling streams. He has not, like Shelley and Byron and Southey, taken a mountain from England and a cedar from Palestine, a column from Greece and a massive pile from Egypt. What he knew best he has best idealized. And in the same manner he has dealt with human character.

... The fact that certain intellects are not affected

by certain forms of poetry is chiefly to be ascribed to a deficiency of culture in that particular direction. For example, there are some men who admire heroism and deeds of active prowess, for whom the story of Tancred and Rinaldo would have most inspiriting charms, while they reap no "harvest of a quiet eye" from the peaceful contemplation of nature which is the characteristic of some of our more modern poetry. On the other hand, there are many who, from temperament or from training, would rather "babble of green fields" with Wordsworth than allow themselves to be agitated by the trumpets and the clarions of epical poetry, the rattling of the armour and the prancing of the steeds. But the fact remains the same, that all minds are capable of being affected pleasurably by poetry of some form or other; the man of active energies by the thunder of the epic; the man of intellects and reasons by the antithetical ring of the didactic-sermoni propiora.

I would say to those who still find delight in the diseased sublimity of Harold and the splendid worthlessness of Juan, Read Wordsworth honestly and fairly, and be brave enough to face disappointment at first. Begin with some of the minor lyrics, and even your Byronic cravings will be satisfied. Take the song for the Wandering Jew; you will not deny, being a Byronian, that that is the merum nectar of poetry. Then take such a poem as this:

"A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

"No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees,

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course

With rocks and stones and trees!"

You will not deny that to be true poetry, or you will be false to your Byronic creed.

Read the rest

in some such order as this :-Laodamia, the poems on Louisa, the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, the lines written above Tintern Abbey; reserving The Excursion for the last. And when you have learned to reverence the calm philosophy and dignified utterance of that colossal poem, you will look with a less scornful eye upon the LeechGatherer and the Sexton, and even upon Goody Blake and the Idiot Boy.

SHELLEY.

THE poems of of your country. They are

HE poems of Shelley stand out in bold relief

in the literature our

destined by their very nature never to become popular. Shelley is preeminently the poet of the few. But perhaps his poetry is by its nature as far removed from the doom of oblivion as it is from the chances of popularity. In the world of English literature he stands alone. He bears a superficial resemblance to but one of our English poets-Henry More, the Platonist; but, regarded closely, this resemblance vanishes. He has neither the deep insight of Wordsworth, the fiery energy of Byron, nor the pregnant self-restraint of Tennyson. most casual reader will perceive at a glance the absurdity of comparing him with any other of our modern poets. Keats, who is sometimes compared with him, is an innocent dreamer of day-dreams beside him.

The

I. There exists, no doubt, a broad line of demarcation between the class of mind which abstracts itself from its idealizations and that which exhibits alone the shifting kaleidoscope of its own suscep

tibilities. Homer is as different from Anacreon as Chaucer from Cowley. Shelley has been repeatedly called a subjective poet. But it is obviously unjust to rank the author of The Cenci in this inferior category. The classification of the poets, which obtains on the Continent, into colourists and formists, is much more generally applicable, because it is more abstract. To the former class Shelley belonged eminently and exclusively. His mind was tremulously sensitive to the beauties of the external creation, and he invested them in hues and tissues not their own. He says himself that his intellect

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was the mirror of all that is lovely in the visible universe." Hence he clothed his thoughts in language teeming with beautiful analogies. From the tranquil valley, from the snow-capt mountains, from the sea, the stars, the rivers, and the streams, from the hooded domes of modern Italy, and from the columns and statues of ancient Greece, he drew his inspiration and formed his images. So likewise have other poets; but here the similarity ends. For, while his imagination revelled in a world of poetical abstractions, varied and numerous as the divinities of the old mythologies, he neglected the study or representation of human actions and of human passions except in one or two important instances. He is emphatically a metaphysical poet [in the deeper sense of the word:] but he introduces no Fausts, no Hamlets, no Manfreds, to