spiritual and romantic.' He was temperate in his habits, gentle, affectionate, and generous; so that even those who most deeply deplored or detested his opinions, were charmed with the intellectual purity and benevolence of his life. His favourite amusement was boating and sailing; and whilst returning one day, the 8th of July 1822, from Leghorn (whither he had gone to welcome Leigh Hunt to Italy), the boat in which he sailed, accompanied by Mr Williams, formerly of the 8th dragoons, and a single seaman, went down in the bay of Spezia, and all perished. A volume of Keats's poetry was found open in Shelley's coat pocket when his body was washed ashore. The remains of the poet were reduced to ashes by fire, and being taken to Rome, were deposited in the Protestant burial ground, near those of a child he had lost in that city. A complete edition of Shelley's Poetical Works, with notes by his widow, has been published in four volumes; and the same accomplished lady has given to the world two volumes of his prose Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments. Shelley's life was a dream of romance-a tale of mystery and grief. That he was sincere in his opinions, and benevolent in his intentions, is now undoubted. He looked upon the world with the eyes of a visionary, bent on unattainable schemes of intellectual excellence and supremacy. His delusion led to misery, and made him, for a time, unjust to others. It alienated him from his family and friends, blasted his prospects in life, and distempered all his views and opinions. It is probable that, had he lived to a riper age, he might have modified some of those extreme speculative and pernicious tenets, and we have no doubt that he would have risen into a purer atmosphere of poetical imagination. The troubled and stormy dawn was fast yielding to the calm noonday brightness. He had worn out some of his fierce antipathies and morbid affections; a happy domestic circle was gathered around him; and the refined simplicity of his tastes and habits, joined to wider and juster views of human life, would imperceptibly have given a new tone to his thoughts and studies. He had a high idea of the art to which he devoted his faculties.

'Poetry,' he says in one of his essays, is the record of the best and happiest moments of the hap: piest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling, sometimes associated with place or person, 'sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression; so that, even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is, as it were, the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the morning calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organisation, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or passion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced those emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of

the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide-abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.' The remote abstract character of Shelley's poetry, and its general want of anything real or tangible, by which the sympathies of the heart are awakened, must always prevent its becoming popular. His mystic idealism renders him obscure, and his imagery is sometimes accumulated, till both precision and effect are lost, and the poet becomes harsh and involved in expression. He sought to reason high in verse-not like Dryden, Pope, or Johnson, but in cold and glittering metaphysics, where the idealism of Berkeley stood in the place of the moral truths and passions of actual life. There is no melancholy grandeur in his pictures, or simple unity in his designs. Another fault is his partiality for painting ghastly and repulsive scenes. He had, however, many great and shining qualities-a rich and fertile imagination, a passionate love of nature, and a diction singularly classical and imposing in sound and structure. The descriptive passages in 'Alastor,' and the river-voyage at the conclusion of the Revolt of Islam,' are among the most finished of his productions. His morbid ghastliness is there laid aside, and his better genius leads him to the pure waters and the depth of forest shades, which none of his contemporaries knew better how to describe. Some of the minor poems are also imbued with a true poetical spirit, and speak the genuine feelings of nature. One striking peculiarity of his style is his constant personification of inanimate objects. In the 'Cenci' we have a strong and almost terrible illustration of this original feature of his poetry :

I remember,

Two miles on this side of the fort, the road
Crosses a deep ravine; 'tis rough and narrow,
And winds with short turns down the precipice;
Which has from unimaginable years
And in its depth there is a mighty rock
Sustained itself with terror and with toil
Over a gulf, and with the agony
With which it clings, seems slowly coming down;
Even as a wretched soul, hour after hour,
Clings to the mass of life, yet clinging, leans,
And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
In which it fears to fall-beneath this crag,
Huge as despair, as if in weariness,
The melancholy mountain yawns; below
You hear, but see not, an impetuous torrent
Raging among the caverns, and a bridge
Crosses the chasm; and high above there grow,
With intersecting trunks, from crag to crag,
Cedars and yews, and pines, whose tangled hair
Is matted in one solid roof of shade
By the dark ivy's twine. At noonday here
"Tis twilight, and at sunset blackest night.
The Flight of the Hours in Promethus' is equally
vivid, and touched with a higher grace

Behold!

The rocks are cioven, and through the purple night
I see cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds,
Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink

[Opening of Queen Mab.]

How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!
One, pale as yonder waning moon,
With lips of lurid blue;
The other, rosy as the morn

When, throned on ocean's wave,
It blushes o'er the world:
Yet both so passing wonderful!

Hath then the gloomy Power,
Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres,
Seized on her sinless soul?

Must then that peerless form

Which love and admiration cannot view
Without a beating heart, those azure veins

Which steal like streams along a field of snow,
That lovely outline, which is fair

As breathing marble, perish?
Must putrefaction's breath

Leave nothing of this heavenly sight
But loathsomeness and ruin?
Spare nothing but a gloomy theme

On which the lightest heart might moralise?
Or is it only a sweet slumber

Stealing o'er sensation,

Which the breath of roseate morning
Chaseth into darkness?

Will Ianthe wake again,
And give that faithful bosom joy
Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch
Light, life, and rapture from her smile?

Her dewy eyes are closed,
And on their lids, whose texture fine
Scarce hides the dark blue orbs beneath,
The baby Sleep is pillowed:
Her golden tresses shade
The bosom's stainless pride,

Curling like tendrils of the parasite
Around a marble column.

Hark! whence that rushing sound?
"Tis like the wondrous strain
That round a lonely ruin swells,
Which, wandering on the echoing shore,

The enthusiast hears at evening:
'Tis softer than the west wind's sigh;
"Tis wilder than the unmeasured notes
Of that strange lyre whose strings
The genii of the breezes sweep:

Those lines of rainbow light

Are like the moonbeams when they fall
Through some cathedral window, but the teints
Are such as may not find
Comparison on earth.

Behold the chariot of the fairy queen!
Celestial coursers paw the unyielding air;
Their filmy pennons at her word they furl,
And stop obedient to the reins of light:

These the queen of spells drew in;
She spread a charm around the spot,
And leaning graceful from the ethereal car,
Long did she gaze, and silently,
Upon the slumbering maid.

The Cloud.*

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet birds every one,

When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.

I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers
Lightning, my pilot, sits;

In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,

Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;

Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,

Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves, remains;

And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

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.
As on the jag of a mountain crag,

Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit, one moment may sit

In the light of its golden wings;

And when sunset may breathe from the lit sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fall

From the depth of heaven above,

With wings folded I rest on mine airy nest,
As still as a brooding dove.

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 ;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,

May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer;

And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
Like a swarm of golden bees,

When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
Till the calm river, lakes, and seas,

*The odes to the Skylark and the Cloud, in the opinion of many critics, bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his productions. They were written as his mind prompted, listening to the carolling of the bird aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens, while he floated in his boat on the Thames. No poet was ever warmed by a more genuine and unforced inspiration. His extreme sensibility gave the intensity of passion to his intellectual pursuits, and rendered his mind keenly alive to every perception of outward objects, as well as to his internal sensations. Such a gift is, among the sad vicissitudes of human life, the disappointments we meet, and the galling sense of our own mistakes and errors, fraught with pain; to escape from such he delivered up his soul to poetry, and felt happy when he sheltered himself from the influence of human sympathies in the wildest regions of fancy.'-Mrs Shelley, Pref. to Poet. Works.

Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone,
And the moon's with a girdle of pearl;

The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.

From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,

Sunbeam proof, I hang like a roof,

The mountains its columns be.

The triumphal arch through which I march,
With hurricane, fire, and snow,

When the powers of the air are chained to my chair,

Is the million-coloured bow;

The sphere-fire above, its soft colours wove,

While the moist earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of the earth and water,

I

And the nursling of the sky;

pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;

I change, but I cannot die.

For after the rain, when, with never a stain,

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex

And out of the caverns of rain,

Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain-awakened flowers, All that ever was

tomb,

I rise and upbuild it again.

6

[From The Sensitive Plant.']

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
And closed them beneath the kisses of night.
And the spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on earth's dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide with love's sweet want,
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.
The snow-drop, and then the violet,
Arose from the ground with warin 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 sweet 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 clear dew on the tender sky;

And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,
The sweetest flower for scent that blows;
And all rare blossoms from every clime,
Grew in that garden in perfect prime.

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 flowrets which, drooping as day drooped too,
Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.
And from this undefiled Paradise

The flowers (as an infant's awakening eyes
Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet
Can first lull, and at last must awaken it),

When heaven's blithe winds had unfolded them,
As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,
Shone smiling to heaven, and every one
Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun;

For each one was interpenetrated

With the light and the odour its neighbour shed,
Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear,
Wrapt and filled by their mutual atmosphere.
But the Sensitive Plant, which could give small fruit
Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,
Received more than all, it loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver ;
For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower:

It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not-the beautiful!
The light winds which, from unsustaining wings,
Shed the music of many murmurings;
The beams which dart from many a star
Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar;
The plumed insects swift and free,
Like golden boats on a sunny sea,
Laden with light and odour, which pass
Over the gleam of the living grass;

The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie
Like fire in the flowers till the sun rides high,
Then wander like spirits among the spheres,
Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears;
The quivering vapours of dim noontide,
Which like a sea o'er the warm earth glide,
In which every sound, and odour, and beam,
Move as reeds in a single stream;

Each and all like ministering angels were
For the Sensitive Plant sweet joy to bear,
Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by,
Like windless clouds o'er a tender sky.

And when evening descended from heaven above,
And the earth was all rest, and the air was all love,
And delight, though less bright, was far more deep,
And the day's veil fell from the world of sleep,

And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned

In an ocean of dreams without a sound;

Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress The light sand which paves it-consciousness;

(Only overhead the sweet nightingale

Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,
And snatches of its Elysian chant

Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant.)
The Sensitive Plant was the earliest
Up-gathered into the bosom of rest;
A sweet child weary of its delight,
The feeblest and yet the favourite,
Cradled within the embrace of night.

[Forest Scenery.]

[From Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude."]

A wandering stream of wind,
Breathed from the west, has caught the expanded sail,
And lo! with gentle motion between banks
Of mossy slope, and on a placid stream
Beneath a woven grove, it sails; and hark!
The ghastly torrent mingles its far roar

With the breeze murmuring in the musical woods.
Where the embowering trees recede, and leave
A little space of green expanse, the cove
Is closed by meeting banks, whose yellow flowers
For ever gaze on their own drooping eyes
Reflected in the crystal calm. The wave

Of the boat's motion marred their pensive task,