and powers, it is feeble in its very hugeness, and "like a devilish engine back recoils." And even as a work of art it fails, from attempting too much. It is too like Eschylus to be equal to Eschylus. It reads, in parts, like a translation from the Greek; and this is fatal to its success. What essayist would succeed now by writing in the style of Plato? or what Epic poet, by giving a duplicate of Homer? Besides, even as a revival of the Grecian drama, the work is imperfect. In the first part, Eschylus is emulated; but ere the close, the genius of Shelley, irresistibly breaking out in all its peculiarities of abstract thought, and in all its extravagancies of lyrical license, mars the verisimilitude. Still, if not the finest, this is the most wonderful and daring production of his pen, and perhaps calculated to give the highest impression of its author's powers, and the deepest sorrow for their premature obscuration. No where do we find more strongly than in its lyrics, a specimen of the Pythian oorgos the rush of poetic numbers, the tremendous gallop of an infuriated imagination.

"Adonais" is an elegy over John Keats, in the style of Lycidas, full of sweetness, sublimity, and pathos, but entangled with "wheel within wheel" of complicated allegory and thick-piled darkness. The best passage is that describing the procession of the mountain shepherds to mourn the death of their lost brother, "their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent." Byron comes, the "pilgrim of eternity, veiling all the lightnings of his song in sorrow," a proud and melancholy mourner. Moore disdains not to follow the hearse of the author of the "Pot of Basil," and thus is his presence described :—

From her wilds Ierne sent

The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,

And love taught grief to fall in music from his tongue.

"What gentler form is hushed over the dead?" It is Leigh Hunt, the discoverer of the boy-poet, who found him. as a naturalist finds a new variety of violet, while gazing on its native stream, amid the silent woods; and who "taught, loved, honoured, the departed one." And in the rear of the laurelled company, lo! a strange, shadowy being, alone among the multitude. It is the poet of Prometheus, mourning with thin, spirit-like wail, the departure of his friend. Listen to Shelley's picture of himself one of those betrayals of personal emotion into which he is sometimes hurried, for he loved too many things, and thoughts, and beings, to be an egotist:

Mid others of less note came one frail form,
A phantom amongst men-companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm,
Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,
Had gazed on nature's naked loveliness,
Actæon like, and then he fled astray

With feeble steps, o'er the world's wilderness,

While his own thoughts along that rugged way

Pursued like raging hounds their father and their prey.

A pardlike spirit, beautiful and swift,

A love in desolation masked, a power
Girt round by weakness.

Of that crew,

He came the last, neglected and apart,

A herd-abandoned deer, pierced by the hunter's dart.

The close of the poem is remarkable for containing the prediction, or presentiment, that as Keats and he had been alike in their lives, so in their deaths they were not long to be divided:

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar,

While, burning through the inmost vale of Heaven,

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.

It has been fulfilled. All of the gifted two that could die, lies now side by side in the same churchyard, under the blue of the same Italian sky.

Our space forbids us dilating on the Cenci more than we have done already. It would require a lengthened article to do justice to its conception of character; its firm and fearless, yet modest and dainty, depiction of the monstrous old man, whose gust of evil is so intense, and whose joy is so purely diabolical; of his feeble and broken-hearted wife, who is as much out of place in her connexion with him, as were a red-breast wedded to a vulture; above all, of Beatrice, that "loveliest specimen of the workmanship of God," with her "eyes swollen with weeping, and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene ;" her "head bound with folds of white drapery, from which the yellow strings of her golden hair escape and fall down about her neck;" her "forehead large and clear; her eyebrows distinct and arched; her lips with that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which suffering has not repressed, and which it seems as if death scarcely could extinguish ;" and preserving, amid the circle of giddy horrors which revolves around her, the purity and greatness of her own soul. Nor must we dwell on its rigid and strong stream of purpose,— its deep and quiet glances into the core of the human heart, -the energetic simplicity of its style, the power of the murder scene, the one exquisite bit, no more, of natural description which occurs in it, and the art by which the fiendish horrors of the beginning, prepare for, and melt away into the heart-rending pathos of the end. How beautiful and affecting the last words of Beatrice, as she is being led along with her mother to early and horrible death :

Give yourself no unnecessary pain,

My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, mother, tie

My girdle for me, and bind up this hair

In any simple knot: ay, that does well,

And yours, I see, is coming down. How often
Have we done this for one another! now

We shall not do it any more. My Lord,

We are quite ready. Well, 'tis very well.

Meant for the first of a series, it stands alone, a colossal marble, the best of Shelley's productions; the first tragedy since Shakspeare, and one of the first poems in this or any age.

"Hellas," the poet himself called a mere improvise, but it is full of a rapid, torrent-like eloquence. As a drama, it limps, but as a poem it storms and hurries on like a very Phlegethon. The revolution in Greece,-in Greece! a country which had become a standing example, and moral, and monument of degeneracy, bursting out suddenly as if its stagnant waters had been disturbed by an angel plunging amid them from the battlements of Heaven,-roused the soul of Shelley, then just falling asleep in its misery. It was "Vesuvius wakening Etna," and the result is before us in this the most vigorous and volcanic of his secondary poems, in which the lava stream of his feelings, scattering away his frequent mist, runs, and rushes, and roars, with a motion like that of Byron's fierce genius, when it produced the Siege of Corinth." In a kindred strain of rapid vehemence does Shelley exult over the downfall of the Turks, and predict the resurrection of old Greece. It is a wild prophetic impromptu, half white foam, and half red fire, lyrical withal, and only shadowed by the mystic shape of Ahasuerus; for here he takes a final farewell of the Wandering Jew, a figure which had haunted his genius all along from "Queen Mab," and another yet earlier poem, which he wrote along with Medwin, down to his "positively last appearance" in

"Hellas." What strange charm the idea had over Shelley's mind we cannot tell; unless, perhaps, a resemblance between his own destiny and crime, and those of this fugitive and vagabond on the face of the earth. As it is, he makes in "Hellas" a very noble exit indeed, and we would back him against a score of Salathiels, and a century of "undying ones," fabricated upon the perpetual motion principle, save the mark! by Mrs. Norton.

Shelley's smaller pieces are very various in style and merit, some of them most ingeniously and ineffably impenetrable, others as lovely and lively, or as soft and plaintive little morsels as ever dropt from human pen. Such, for instance, are the sweet and pure Anacreontic, beginning, “The fountains mingle with the river;" the "Lines to an Indian Air;" the "Lines written in dejection at Naples;" the "Hymn to a Skylark," which might be set to that blythest of bird's own music, and whose words dance like a fay in the silver shine of the moon; the "Sensitive Plant," the sweetest, strangest, dreamiest, holiest thing in all his poetry, with that lone figure of the nameless lady in it, glorifying her garden for evermore; the "Ode to Naples," mounting, as on stormwings of shadowy fire, into the very dome of the Temple of the Lyric Muse; the "Poem on the Aziola," and her “sad cry;" the "Lines on the Euganean Hills," with their eloquent remonstrance to the "Swan of Albion," then soiling his desperate wing in the "sins and slaveries foul" of the sea-Sodom; the "Mont Blanc ;""Julian and Madallo," with its fine portraiture of Byron and himself in the undress of their Titanic souls, "rolling billiard balls about," instead of pointing their batteries against the wide-mouthed artillery of Heaven; and lastly, "Peter Bell the Third," which, published since his death, has discovered an under-current of burning sarcasm to have run on in secret under the lake of his genius.