as it were, wantonly, by introducing into his conduct the enthusiastic imagination which he should have kept for his verses. From his birth he had the vision' of sublime beauty and happiness, and the contemplation of the ideal world set him in arms against the actual. Having refused at Eton to be the fag of the big boys, he was treated by the boys and the masters with a revolting cruelty; suffered himself to be made a martyr, refused to obey, and, falling back into forbidden studies, began to form the most immoderate and most poetical dreams. He judged society by the oppression which he underwent, and man by the generosity which he felt in himself; thought that man was good, and society bad, and that it was only necessary to suppress established institutions to make earth a paradise.' He became a republican, a communist, preached fraternity, love, even abstinence from flesh, and as a means the abolition of kings, priests, and God.' Fancy the indignation which such ideas roused in a society so obstinately attached to established order-so intolerant, in which, above the conservative and religious instincts, Cant spoke like a master. He was expelled from the university; his father refused to see him; the Lord Chancellor, by a decree, took from him, as being unworthy, the custody of his two children; finally, he was obliged to quit England. I forgot to say that at eighteen he married a girl of mean birth, that they had been separated, that she committed suicide, that he had undermined his health by his excitement and sufferings, and that to the end of his life he was nervous or sick. Is not this the life of a genuine poet? Eyes fixed on the splendid apparitions with which he peopled space, he went through the world not seeing the high road, stumbling over the stones of the roadside. That knowledge of life which most poets have in common with novelists, he had not. Seldom has a mind been seen in which thought soared in loftier regions, and more far from actual things. When he tried to create characters and events-in Queen Mab, in Alastor, in The Revolt of Islam, in Prometheus—he only produced unsubstantial phantoms. Once only, in the Cenci, did he inspire a living figure worthy of Webster or old Ford; but in some sort in spite of himself, and because in it the sentiments were so unheard of and so strained that they suited superhuman conceptions. Elsewhere his world is throughout beyond our own. The laws of life are suspended or transformed. We move in this world between heaven and earth, in abstraction, dreamland, symbolism: the beings float in it like those fantastic figures which we see in the clouds, and which alternately undulate and change form capriciously, in their robes of snow and gold.

For souls thus constituted, the great consolation is nature. They are too fairly sensitive to find a distraction in the spectacle and pic

1 Queen Mab, and notes. At Oxford Shelley issued a kind of thesis, calling it 'On the Necessity of Atheism.'

* Some time before his death, when he was twenty-nine, he said, 'If I die now, I shall have lived as long as my father.'

ture of human passions. Shelley instinctively avoided it; this sight re-opened his own wounds. He was happier in the woods, at the seaside, in contemplation of grand landscapes. The rocks, clouds, and meadows, which to ordinary eyes seem dull and insensible, are, to a wide sympathy, living and divine existences, which are an agreeable change from men. No virgin smile is so charming as that of the dawn, nor any joy more triumphant than that of the ocean when its waves creep and tremble, as far as the eye can see, under the prodigal splendour of heaven. At this sight the heart rises unwittingly to the sentiments of ancient legends, and the poet perceives in the inexhaustible bloom of things the peaceful soul of the great mother by whom everything grows and is supported. Shelley spent most of his life in the open air, especially in his boat; first on the Thames, then on the Lake of Geneva, then on the Arno, and in the Italian waters. He loved desert and solitary places, where man enjoys the pleasure of believing infinite what he sees, infinite as his soul. And such was this wide ocean, and this shore more barren than its waves. This love was a deep Germanic instinct, which, allied to pagan emotions, produced his poetry, pantheistic and yet pensive, almost Greek and yet English, in which fancy plays like a foolish, dreamy child, with the splendid skein of forms and colours. A cloud, a plant, a sunrise,—these are his characters: they were those of the primitive poets, when they took the lightning for a bird of fire, and the clouds for the flocks of heaven. But what a secret ardour beyond these splendid images, and how we feel the heat of the furnace beyond the coloured phantoms, which it sets afloat over the horizon!1 Has any one since Shakspeare and Spenser lighted on such tender and such grand ecstasies? Has any one painted so magnificently the cloud which watches by night in the sky, enveloping in its net the swarm of golden bees, the stars:

The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,

Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,

When the morning star shines dead.
That orbed maiden, with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,

Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn. '3

Read again those verses on the garden, in which the sensitive plant dreams. Alas! they are the dreams of the poet, and the happy visions which floated in his virgin heart up to the moment when it opened out and withered. I will pause in time; I will not proceed, like him, beyond the recollections of his spring-time:

1 See in Shelley's Works, 1853, The Witch of Atlas, The Cloud, To a Sky. lark, the end of The Revolt of Islam, Alastor, and the whole of Prometheus. The Cloud, c. iii. 502. Ibid. c. iv. 503.

'The snowdrop, and then the violet,

Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,

And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, sent
From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.

Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall,
And narcissi, the fairest among them all,
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess,
Till they die of their own dear loveliness.
And the Naiad-like lily of the vale,
Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale,
That the light of its tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilions of tender green;

And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue,
Which flung from its bells a sweat peal anew
Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,
It was felt like an odour within the sense;

And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest,
Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,
Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare;

And the wand-like lily, which lifted up,

As a Mænad, its moonlight-coloured cup,

Till the fiery star, which is its eye,

Gazed through the clear dew on the tender sky

And on the stream whose inconstant bosom
Was prankt, under boughs of embowering blossom,
With golden and green light, slanting through
Their heaven of many a tangled hue,

Broad water-lilies lay tremulously,

And starry river-buds glimmered by,

And around them the soft stream did glide and dance
With a motion of sweet sound and radiance.

And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,

Which led through the garden along and across,

Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,
Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,

Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells,
As fair as the fabulous asphodels,

And flowerets which drooping as day drooped too,
Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.'1

Everything lives here, everything breathes and yearns. This poem, the story of a plant, is also the story of a soul-Shelley's soul, the sensitive. Is it not natural to confound them? Is there not a com

1 Shelley's Works, 1853, The Sensitive Plant, 490.

munity of nature amongst all the dwellers in this world? Verily there is a soul in everything; in the universe is a soul: be the existence what it will, unhewn or rational, defined or vague, ever beyond its sensible form shines a secret essence and something divine, which we catch sight of by sublime illuminations, never reaching or penetrating it. It is this presentiment and yearning which raises all modern poetry,-now in Christian meditations, as with Campbell and Wordsworth, now in pagan visions, as with Keats and Shelley. They hear the great heart of nature beat; they would reach it; they assay all spiritual and sensible approaches, through Judea and through Greece, by consecrated dogmas and by proscribed dogmas. In this splendid and senseless effort the greatest are exhausted and die. Their poetry, which they drag with them over these sublime tracks, is rent thereby. One alone, Byron, attains the summit; and of all these grand poetic draperies, which float like standards, and seem to summon men to the conquest of supreme truth, we see now but tatters scattered by the wayside.

Yet they did their work. Under their multiplied efforts, and by their involuntary concert, the idea of the beautiful is changed, and other ideas change by contagion. Conservatives contribute to it like revolutionaries, and the new spirit breathes through the poems which bless and those which curse Church and State. We learn from Wordsworth and Byron, by profound Protestantism1 and confirmed scepticism, that in this sacred cant-defended establishment there is matter for reform or for revolt; that we may discover moral merits other than those which the law tickets and opinion accepts; that beyond conventional confessions there are truths; that beyond respected conditions there are greatnesses; that beyond regular positions there are virtues ; that greatness is in the heart and the genius; and all the rest, actions and beliefs, are subaltern. We have just seen that beyond literary conventionalities there is a poetry, and consequently we are disposed to feel that beyond religious dogmas there may be a faith, and beyond social institutions a justice. The old edifice totters, and the Revolution enters, not by a sudden inundation, as in France, but by slow infiltration. The wall built up against it by public intolerance cracks and opens the war waged against Jacobinism, republican and imperial, ends in victory; and henceforth we may regard opposing ideas, not as opposing enemies, but as ideas. We regard them, and, accommodating them to the different countries, we import them. Catholics are enfranchised, rotten boroughs abolished, the electoral

1Our life is turned

Out of her course, whenever man is made

An offering, a sacrifice, a tool,

Or implement, a passive thing employed

As a brute mean.'-Wordsworth, The Excursion.

franchise lowered; unjust taxes, which kept up the price of corn, were repealed; ecclesiastical tithes changed into rent charges; the terrible laws protecting property were modified, the incidence of taxation brought more and more on the rich classes; old institutions, formerly established for the advantage of a race, and in this race of a class, are only maintained when for the advantage of all classes; privileges become functions; and in this triumph of the middle class, which shapes opinion and assumes the ascendency, the aristocracy, passing from sinecures to services, seems now legitimate only as a national nursery, kept up to furnish public men. At the same time narrow orthodoxy is enlarged. Zoology, astronomy, geology, botany, anthropology, all the sciences of observation, so much cultivated and so popular, forcibly introduce their dissolvent discoveries. Criticism comes in from Germany, re-handles the Bible, re-writes the history of dogma, attacks dogma itself. Meanwhile poor Scotch philosophy is dried up. Amidst the agitations of sects, endeavouring to transform each other, and the rising Unitarianism, we hear at the gates of the sacred ark the Continental philosophy roaring like a wave. Now already has it encroached upon literature: for fifty years all great writers have plunged into it,-Sidney Smith, by his sarcasms against the numbness of the clergy and the oppression of the Catholics; Arnold, by his protests against the religious monopoly of the clergy and the ecclesiastical monopoly of the Anglicans; Macaulay, by his history and panegyric of the liberal revolution; Thackeray, by attacking the nobles, in the interests of the middle class; Dickens, by attacking dignitaries and wealthy men, in the interests of the lowly and poor; Currer Bell and Mrs. Browning, by defending the initiative and independence of women; Stanley and Jowett, by introducing the German exegesis, and by fixing biblical criticism; Carlyle, by importing German metaphysics in an English form; Stuart Mill, by importing French positivism in an English form; Tennyson himself, by extending over the beauties of all lands and all ages the protection of his amiable dilettantism and his poetical sympathies, each according to his pattern and his position, with various profundity; all restrained within reach of the shore by their practical prejudices, all strengthened against falling by their moral prejudices; all bent, some with more of eagerness, others with more of distrust, in welcoming or giving entrance to the growing tide of modern democracy and philosophy in constitution and church, without doing damage, and gradually so as to destroy nothing, and to make everything bear fruit.