seventeen." A glance will reveal the meaning of that strut, that necktie, that canary-coloured glove. The young gentleman has begun by imagining himself an amalgamation of Apollo, Antinous, and Adonis. He has gone on to imagine himself in love. He ends by imagining himself a Byron. Do not doubt that he is at this moment reciting to himself what he can remember of The Dream or Locksley Hall. You have here the modern Falstaff and the modern Malvolio. Now Shakespeare, whose ideal of the drama was the holding up of a mirror before nature, saw all this; and thus even his most thrilling tragedies are relieved by touches of comedy. But the principle of such writers as Shelley is to idealize nature, not merely to represent her as she is. They appear tacitly to consider it degrading to tragedy to mix it up with such phases of humanity as the fool, the clown, and the drunken Porter, which are, nevertheless, faithful transcripts of humanity.'

V. Its intense subjectivity, its ethereal brilliancy, its professed universality, are the beauty and the attraction of [Shelley's] philosophy. It is a mistake to call it Atheism. It is a system of Pantheism, rendered lovely and alluring with the hues and

1 Not that the Author had forgotten the praise bestowed by Shelley on "King Lear." See "Life and Letters of E. J. Armstrong," p. 422.—ED.

outlines of an angel. But woe to him who is seduced by its siren laughter and its bewitching sighs! Woe to him who falls a victim to its glance of summer-lightning and the subtle magic of its wreathen smiles! . . It is a philosophy which might well dupe an ardent imagination. It vanishes like a beautiful bubble before the breath of reason. But to a man of not much reason or imagination, but of a loving and trustful nature, it will appear at once heartless and fallacious, "a thing wherein he feels there is some hidden want." It was a philosophy which did not even confer happiness upon its author. There are passages of despair in his poetry which wither up the soul like the hot blasts of a furnace. No man has afforded a better practical comment on the old cry against infidelity— “Build up, if you can, an edifice more beautiful, more stately, a faith more suited to the cravings of the human heart, than that which you have attempted to destroy!" What, indeed, would he

1

1 The weak point in Shelley's character was early detected by Godwin, who exposed it to Shelley himself in a letter (dated March 4, 1812), printed in the "Shelley Memorials,” and in Mr. C. Kegan Paul's pleasantly-written Memoirs of Godwin :"One principle that I believe is wanting in you, and in all our too fervent and impetuous reformers, is the thought that almost every institution and form of society is good in its place and in the period of time to which it belongs. How many beautiful and admirable effects grew out of Popery and the monastic institutions in the period when they were in their genuine health and vigour. To them we owe almost all our

give us in exchange for the faith of our fathers? He bids us worship and pay our vows in the Temple of Nature without its God. That wondrous Temple, whose vast illimitable dome is fretted with innumerable globes of fire, whose columns are the eagle-baffling crags-no spirit breathes in it, no Shekinah illumines its Holy of Holies. It is as a loved and lovely being, from whose deep eye the sparkle has vanished, from whose lips the light of life has fled away. In its cold obstruction it is ineffably beautiful; but there is no throb there to tell of life, no murmured word to breathe of hope. What is all its beauty without life? What are all its sweet fainting colours without warmth ?-Dust and ashes in a sarcophagus of jewels, corruption and loathsomeness in the regalia of a queen.

He saw the divinity of sorrow, and the sublime majesty of triumphant suffering, in the chains, the vulture, the adamant of Prometheus; but a film fell upon his eyes, and a coldness entered into his heart, when he turned to gaze on the Cross of Calvary, and the God who paled with anguish there. The

logic and our literature. What excellent effects do we reap, even at this day, from the feudal system and from chivalry! In this point of view nothing perhaps can be more worthy of our applause than the English Constitution. . . . There is a period, indeed, when each institution is obsolete, and should be laid aside; but it is of much importance that we should not proceed too rapidly in this, or introduce any change before its due and proper season."-Ed.

selfish woes of his Alastor were a dream of ravishing music to him; but he shut his ears to that voice of sublime self-sacrificing agony that rent the Temple's veil and shook the darkened world. In the inarticulate murmurings of the weary West Wind he found a feeble response to the tears and sighs of humanity; but the awful human expressions of divine agony that broke the night-silence of Gethsemane grated harshly upon his being.

But it is not for us to judge him. . . We have before us no Bolingbroke, no Lyttelton, no Voltaire, no Chesterfield. We have a man whose exquisite purity of morals is only sullied by one dark blot...; a man who loved his fellow-beings with an intense and sacred passion; who, despite a physical organization tremblingly feminine, fought manfully and well in a noble cause of which he was the mistaken adherent; who, although the means he adopted were reprehensible, and the end at which he aimed different from the true one, struggled with all the energies of his being to effect a glorious purposethe regeneration of his race; who devoted his life, his time, his labour, his imagination of molten gold, not to the selfish object of personal fame, but to the achievements of a pure, though mistaken, philanthropy. Such a man was Percy Bysshe Shelley— of such amiability, of such true nobleness of soul, that we can only attribute the evils of his character to his want of that faith which is to man as the compass to the mariner on a storm-blown ocean.

176

KEATS.

H

[ITHERTO] I have been always accustomed

to admire the poetry of Keats as one who is not an artist or a natural philosopher admires a beautiful landscape; the lights and shadows afford a pure delight, without its cause being analyzed; the roar of the waterfall subdues and softens, without a scientific investigation of the laws of acoustics; the soughing of the breeze in the leaves of the wood is a sufficient enjoyment in itself, without any very profound considerations respecting the vibrations of the atmosphere. To me the poetry of Keats has ever been like a garden of flowers "lovelier than their names," and I have been hitherto passively content to admire the flowers without stooping to decipher the floricultural Latin inscribed on the stakes at their sides.

The poetry of Keats is remarkable in an eminent degree for its sensuousness; and I think, on the whole, it more sensuous than ideal. No man was ever more physically a poet than Keats. He exhibits in his tremulous sensibility the finest illustration of the old dogma, poeta nascitur. He was in truth born a poet. His nerves thrilled, his pulses