chant of Demogorgon in " Prometheus Unbound” can hardly be compared with anything outside of Shakespeare or the Bible. The Cenci" is as terrible, as noble, and as simple as any of Marlowe's tragedies. "Adonais," an elegy on Keats, is one of the four greatest poems of its class in English, the others being Milton's "Lycidas,” Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and Tennyson's “In Memoriam."

It is by his shorter poems, however, that Shelley is best known. Swinburne calls them scraps of heaven and shreds of paradise. The "Ode to the West Wind" is one of the supreme poems of all time, beyond and outside and above all criticism, all praise, and all thanksgiving. The "Letter to Maria Gisborne,” the “ Hymn to Hermes,” and the "Witch of Atlas" are joyous and high-spirited little masterpieces. The "Ode to Liberty" and the "Ode to Naples " are noble expressions of the hatred of tyranny and the faith in republican government which from first to last characterized their author. thusa," "The Cloud," and "The Sensitive Plant" are fascinating fancies. But the " Ode to a Skylark " is perhaps the best, as it is certainly the best known, of Shelley's poems.

“Are

Coleridge, whose disciple Shelley was, lived twice as long as his pupil but did not do a twentieth part of Shelley's good work. How good that work was may be guessed from the following extracts and quotations:

"The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams."

The Spirit of Solitude.

"Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered_hours."

Prometheus Unbound.
Ibid.

"Thy words are like a cloud of wingêd snakes."
"The path through which that lovely twain
Have past by cedar, pine, and yew,
And each dark tree that ever grew

Is curtained out from Heaven's wide blue.

'For Winter came; the wind was his whip;
One choppy finger was on his lip;
He had torn the cataracts from the hills,
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles."

The Sensitive Plant.

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

With some pain is fraught;

To a Skylark.

Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought."

'Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, and the rest Who made our land an island of the blest."

Ibid.

To Maria Gisborne.

"As the ghost of Homer sings

Round Scamander's wasting springs;
As divinest Shakespeare's might
Fills Avon and the world with light."

"Our boat is asleep on Serchio's Stream:

Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream."

The Euganean Hills.

The Boat on the Serchio.

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

66 That orbed maiden

With white fire laden,

Ozymandias.

The Cloud.

Whom mortals call the moon." Macaulay, whose judgment of poets and poetry is usually sound, says of Shelley: "The strong imagination of Shelley made him an idolater in his own despite. Out of the most indefinite terms of a hard, cold, dark metaphysical system he made a gorgeous Pantheon, full of beautiful, majestic, and godlike forms. He turned atheism itself into a mythology rich with visions as glorious as the gods that live in the marble of Phidias or the virgin saints that smile on us from the canvas of Murillo. The Spirit of Beauty, the Principle of Good, the Principle of Evil, when he treated of them, ceased to be abstractions. They took shape and color. They were no longer mere words, but 'intelligible forms '; 'fair humanities'; objects of love, of adoration, or of fear. As there can be no stronger sign of a mind destitute of the poetical faculty than that tendency which was so common among the writers of the French school to turn images into abstraction-Venus, for example, into Love; Minerva into Wisdom; Mars into War; Bacchus into Festivity-so there can be no stronger sign of a mind truly poetical than a disposition to reverse this abstracting process and to make individuals out of generalities. Some of the metaphysical and ethical theories of Shelley were certainly most absurd and pernicious. But we doubt whether any modern poet has possessed in an equal degree some of the highest qualities of the great ancient masters. His poetry seems not to have been an art but an inspiration. Had he lived to the full age of man he might not improbably have given to the world some great work of the very highest rank in design and execution."

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. Read Shelley's "Masque of Anarchy." What effect do you believe it had upon the conservative England of one hundred years ago?

2. Who wrote "Frankenstein"?

3. How large a gap in form, in thought, in subject-matter, is there between the poetry of Pope and that of Shelley?

4. Shelley was a radical; from your English history discover the attitude of English statesmen to radicalism between the years 1815-1825. 5. How true an estimate of Shelley was Matthew Arnold's

tual spirit, beating his luminous wings in the void"?

a pale ineffec

6. Shelley's note was essentially lyrical. How great a part has lyricism played in the poetry of the romantic movement?

7. Compare Shelley's spirit to Byron's. In what were they alike and how did they differ?

8. In what poem are the following lines:

“Life, like a dome of many colored glass

Stains the white radiance of eternity"?

9. Macaulay said of Shelley: "His poetry seems not to have been an art but an inspiration." Discuss this thought.

10. Write a two-hundred-word composition upon the life and poetry of Shelley.

Suggested Readings.—“ The Cloud," "To a Skylark," "Ode to the West Wind," and "Adonaïs will give the reader but a taste of the consistent beauty of this poet. Dowden's "Life of Shelley" is excellent; T. J. Hogg's "Shelley at Oxford" is a delightful contemporary account.

CHAPTER XXXIV

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

“His fragment of “Hyperion" seems actually inspired by the Titans and is as sublime as Eschylus."-Byron.

"John Keats was one of those sweet and glorious spirits who descend like the angel messengers of old, to discharge some divine command, not to dwell here."-W. Howitt.

SOMEBODY has said of John Keats that, after he grew up, he was unable to write bad poetry. He certainly produced some of the most exquisite verse of all time. He was the eldest son of a London stable-keeper. His education, owing to the death of both his parents, stopped short in his fifteenth year.

He was then apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton, where he worked until, in 1814, he removed to London in order to be near the hospitals. His passion for poetry led him, however, to abandon the medical profession and subsist on his small inheritance. In 1817 he published a volume of poems, which contained the famous sonnet, "On first looking into Chapman's Homer." Early in 1818 this was followed by his first long poem, " Endymion," which he himself condemned as immature and which "Blackwood's Magazine" and the Quarterly Review" attacked so savagely that the story arose that his death was due to their fury. This legend has been kept alive by Byron's famous quatrain:

"Who killed John Keats?

I,' says the Quarterly, So savage and tartarly, "'Twas one of my feats.""

As a matter of fact they disturbed him little. Instead of worrying about the opinions of obscure hack writers or attempting to reply to their criticisms, he composed during 1818-1819 an answer which forever silenced them. In other words, he wrote "Isabella," "Hyperion, ," "The Eve of St. Agnes," "Lamia," several wonderful odes, a number of scarcely less wonderful sonnets, "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and "The Eve of St. Mark." In the midst of these labors