66

"and languor that spread their sinister influence over these 66 notes. I dislike speaking of myself, but cannot help apologising to the dead and to the public, for not having ex"ecuted in the manner I desired the history I engaged to give of Shelley's writings."

Perhaps no inconsiderable portion of recent poetry will be imperfectly understood, should it survive so long, a century hence. We do not readily enter into the conceits of Cowley, or the aphorisms of lord Brooke; and something, it is probable, has passed away of the simple faith with which Spenser was studied at a time when his volumes lay in baywindows for the contemplative idler or inmate to turn over. And if this befall authors in whom the understanding or the fancy is the faculty most exercised, much more does it happen to those who have made their own subjectivity the object of passion or reflection. Should any one hereafter write a commentary on Childe Harold or Alastor, his principal difficulty would be to explain how it had come to pass that satiety of life had superseded more generous and active sentiments in the poets of the 19th century. The poetry of young men, it has been remarked, often exhibits a disposition to melancholy; but it is the ideal contrast to the actual hopefulness and animation of early years. But in much of the best poetry of this and the preceding generation the grander chords of human feeling are silent, and an idealized self takes place of the passion, the thoughtfulness and sententious wisdom of our earlier writers. This, more than any differences of theory or execution, constitutes the essential distinction between the school of Byron and Shelley-for widely as they differ in details, they resemble one another in the original elements of their poetry-and that of which Wordsworth is the representative. Both, in some measure, acted upon a mistaken theory of art; yet the error of the reflective school is less dangerous to the permanence of its reputation, than the assumption that the outward world, the past and the future, are but ministrant to the contemplation of the poet's own being, idealized in passion or in action. For it follows necessarily, that to enter into the secret meaning of such writers, the reader must partake of a similar idiosyn

bols of the outward world will remain vague and meaningless, and his contemplation of the inner world be dependent upon his degree of personal sympathy with the feelings and impulses of another. This being rather an accident than a law of intellectual developement, must in a great measure pass away with the circumstances that nurtured and gave rise to it, and therefore, so far as it is peculiar to the individual mind, becomes daily less and less expressive either of the universal feeling, or of the current opinions of a later age. And this, more than any inferiority as artists, has weakened the once predominant influence of Byron upon his own time, and of Shelley upon individual minds, and for a while even deprived them of a reputation they had justly won and enjoyed. Their names were united in life, and in death have not been divided,—although the resemblance between them lies not in the forms they embodied, in their imaginative resources, or in the command of the materials of their art. In all these qualities they were dissimilar, and Shelley immeasurably superior; but both agreed in subordinating the universal man to the personal sensations and experiences of the poet. A desire for something more comprehensive in principle and nobler in aim than the literature of the 18th century had proposed to itself, animated the ethical and imaginative writers of the present one. It was, unconsciously to themselves, a period of transition in the intellectual world, as in the political it was a period of convulsion. Men were dissatisfied with the present: no theory, in an age most prolific in speculation, was found that would reconcile the inconsistencies perceived to exist between the spiritual wants of the time and its institutions; and it was required of philosophy to establish something positive, some living principle of belief and action, in place of the forms and opinions the negative philosophy of the preceding century had undermined. Hence literature and philosophy betray a want of precision in form, and of proportion between what they aimed at and what they accomplished, of which we are becoming daily more aware, without perhaps having arrived at any steadier exponents of truth. Much that has scarcely ceased to be new, is already become obsolete and inexpressive of our present selves.

and we know not as yet the rightful and unquestioned pos

sessor.

A falser system of philosophy than that which Shelley derived from the French writers of the 18th century, and recommended in his earlier works, can hardly be conceived. It required of man to divest himself of his rich inheritance of laws and recollections,-to form a new world by demolishing the old one, and to assume that the living generation had been the first to break the fetters imposed upon mankind from their birth by the fraud and the credulity of their forefathers. Property and domestic rights were to be the first sacrifice to the new deity of unrestraint, and vegetable diet its ceremonial law. With a strange incoherence, the prophets of this latter dispensation indulged in glowing descriptions of the equal laws and unchartered life of antiquity, thus, in their zeal for innovation, overlooking the moral of ethnic no less than of Christian history,-that the resistance to the cosmopolite tendency of monarchies, and the defence of home-born institutions and ancestral manners, constituted whatever is noble and memorable in the history of the most civilised races of the ancient world. But a similar error is observable in the founders of all systems, from anabaptism to utilitarianism, who regard man as the creature of law, and not the law itself as only the most general exponent of individual action. And the fallacy consists in their viewing man in the aggregate, not as a living soul of complicate impulses and passions, moulded to his present state of social existence by progressive and providential causes, and most rarely by the feverous haste and presumption of a single age. But the imaginative and moral teachers who preceded the French revolution, and their disciples, resembled a fanatical mob of the 16th century more than the sage and serious instructors of their generation. In their lust for optimism, or that impossible good which is to be attained by the disruption of all hitherto held the safeguards of steady and progressive cultivation, they trampled upon the household bonds of life, and political subordination, and moral reverence. All the rich inheritance derived from their Teutonic ancestors, from the better parts of ethnic institutions and from Christianity, was

cause some of the forms that had hitherto transmitted it from age to age were become sapless and withered, and no longer expressed the feelings in which they originated. Miserable reasoners are they who would make a church paramount to a state, but worse reasoners are those who would found a state without a church! They misunderstand antiquity, that, while it held fast to these polar principles of moral government, prospered in spite of barbaric force, of domestic treason and of calamity by war, pestilence and famine. They are insensible to the higher and more catholic civilization by which Christianity, with all the abuses of ecclesiastical power and among all the fluctuations of civil, and despite of the fraud of kings and the madness of the multitude, has knit Europe together into one brotherhood, and imparted whatever is substantial, whatever is progressive in national life to less fortunate portions of the world.

We have been led away from Shelley; but it was necessary to call to mind the state of opinion in his youth, and the theories upon which his intellect prematurely fed. For men of imaginative temperaments no line of study has more attractions, and none is less salutary in early manhood, than the doctrine of political renovation. Even Milton, strictly disciplined as he was in all good learning, and living in an age when a severe apprenticeship was demanded of all who would gain the public ear, is too often a day-dreamer when he reasons upon government and the proper destiny of man. For the imaginative mind is essentially dramatic, and impersonates its own conceptions until it ends with taking them for substantial forms. But, fortunately for himself and his art, Milton's theories entered sparingly into his poetry; his zeal poured itself forth in controversies wherein he admits that he had the use of his left hand only. Shelley conceived that the noblest use of poetic powers was the recommendation of philosophic truth; but he did not sufficiently distinguish between assertive truth, which is the province of the imagination; and discursive truth, which is the business of the understanding.

Hence the course of his poetry is broken up and narrowed by crude and ill-timed expressions of opinion, and the sense of

impaired by sudden appeals to our understanding, our prejudices or our moral sense. From these defects the later poetry of Shelley is comparatively exempt; the harsh reception his works met with from the public was not without salutary results to himself; and he felt, although not until after his longer poems were composed, the necessity of selection and condensation. But it is probable that many portions of the Prometheus and the Revolt of Islam, which were less pleasing to contemporary readers from the injudicious mixture of poetic imagery with logical notions, will pass unnoticed hereafter. Other speculations will alarm or gratify the readers of another generation, even as we neglect the allegory and the political allusions in the Faery Queen, and derive a more intellectual pleasure from its tesselated legends than the courtiers and scholars of the Elizabethan age. We approximate in opinion and feeling to the poets of the 19th century too much to discern what will be permanent in their works. We have seen in our time too many revivals of once popular writers, and too many abortive attempts to resuscitate others, not to distrust experience and general laws, and not to make allowance for the accidents of oblivion and reputation.

It is a more pleasant, though still a painful task, to turn from the philosophy of Shelley to his life, so much at least as we know of it from the unsatisfactory accounts hitherto published. What his biographers have omitted doing we cannot supply, since our narrative must break off and be resumed, just as they are reserved or communicative. We shall therefore take Mrs. Shelley for our guide, and detail briefly the history of his principal poems, since they exhibit with sufficient exactness the history of the author's mind. The few extracts we can afford to make will thus come almost in chronological order, and will be at the same time a record of the feelings that prompted them.

The blank verse of Queen Mab differs little from that measure as it appears in the poems of Akenside, who exercised considerable influence over such poets as escaped from the popular vortex of Darwinism. It is fitted for didactic poetry, and its chief defects are too great uniformity of cadence, and the predominance of single good lines without continuous