sentiments are obvious enough, and the play had consequently some success, being the only one of Shelley's poems that reached a second edition in his lifetime. SEATON, R. C., 1881, Shelley, The Temple Bar, vol. 61, p. 234. The greatest English dramatic poem of the century.-PAYNE, WILLIAM MORTON, 1895, Little Leaders, p. 19. ADONAIS 1821 ADONAIS | An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. By | Percy B. Shelley | Αστήρ πρὶν μὲν ἐλαμπες ενι ζῶοισιν εῶος. | Νυν δε θανῶν, λαμπεις ἔσπερος εν φθίμενοις. Plato. Pisa With the Types of Didot MDCCCXXI. — TITLE PAGE OF FIRST EDITION, 1821. There is much in the “Adonais” which seems now more applicable to Shelley himself, than to the young and gifted poet whom he mourned. The poetic view he takes of death, and the lofty scorn he displays towards his calumniators, are as a prophecy on his own destiny, when received among immortal names, and the poisonous breath of critics has vanished into empti ness before the fame he inherits.-SHELLEY, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, 1839, ed. Shelley's Poetical Works, p. 328. There is, in reading his poem, a feeling of deeper sorrow for the poet that wrote than for him that was lamented.―REED, HENRY, 1850-55, Lectures on English Literature from Chaucer to Tennyson, p. 321. An elegy only equalled in our language by "Lycidas," and in the point of passionate eloquence even superior to Milton's youthful lament for his friend.-SyMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON, 1879, Shelley (English Men of Letters), p. 143. As an utterance of abstract pity and indignation, "Adonaïs" is unsurpassed in literature; with its hurrying train of beautiful spectral images, and the irresistible current and thrilling modulation of its verse, it is perhaps the most perfect and sympathetic effect of Shelley's art; while its strain of transcendental consolation for mortal loss contains the most lucid exposition of his philosophy. But of Keats as he actually lived the elegy presents no feature, while the general impression it conveys of his character and fate is erroneous. COLVIN, SIDNEY, 1887, Keats (English Men of Letters), p. 207. "Adonais," perhaps the most widely read of the longer poems of Shelley, owes something of its charm to the fact noted by Mrs. Shelley. The elegy has contributed much to the feeling that links these two poets in one memory, though in life they were rather pleasant than intimate friends.-WOODBERRY, GEORGE EDWARD, 1901, ed. The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cambridge ed., p. 307. GENERAL There is no Original Poetry in this volume: [Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire"]: there is nothing in it but downright scribble. It is really annoying to see the waste of paper which is made by such persons as the putters-together of these 64 pages. There is, however, one consolation for the critics who are obliged to read all this sort of trash. It is that the crime of publishing is generally followed by condign punishment in the shape of bills from the stationer and printer, and in the chilling tones of the bookseller, when, to the questions of the anxious. rhymer how the book sells, he answers that not more than a half-a-dozen copies have been sold.-ANON, 1810-11, The Poetical Register and Repository of Fugitive Poetry. I can no more understand Shelley than you can. His poetry is "thin-sown with profit or delight." . . . For his theories and nostrums, they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend 'em not, or there is "miching malice" and mischief in 'em ; but, for the most part, ringing with their own emptiness. Hazlitt said well of 'em, "Many are the wiser or better for reading Shakspeare, but nobody was ever wiser or better for reading Shelley."- LAMB, CHARLES, 1824, To Bernard Barton, Aug. 24; Life and Letters, ed. Talfourd. Mr. Shelley's style is to poetry what astrology is to natural science-a passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions, a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature, associating ideas by contraries, and wasting great powers by their application to unattainable objects. HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1824, Shelley's Posthumous Poems, Edinburgh Review, vol. 40, p. 494. The disappearance of Shelley from the world, seems, like the tropical setting of that luminary (aside I hate that word) to which his poetical genius can alone be compared with reference to the companions of his day, to have been followed by instant darkness and owl-season; whether the vociferous Darley is to be the comet, or tender fullfaced L. E. L. the milk-andwatery moon of our darkness, are questions for the astrologers: if I were the literary weather-guesser for 1825 I would safely prognosticate fog, rain, blight in due succession for its dullard months.- BEDDOES, THOMAS LOVELL, 1824, Letters, p.33. Percy Bysshe Shelley was a man of far superior powers to Keats. He had many of the faculties of a great poet. He was, however, we verily believe it now, scarcely in his right mind.-WILSON, JOHN, 1826, Blackwood's Magazine, Preface, vol. 19. Shelley is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style.-WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM, 1827, Miscellaneous Memoranda, Memoirs by Christopher Wordsworth, vol. II, p. 484. 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 life-like 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 canvass 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 colour. 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 abstractions, -Venus, for example, into Love, Minerva into Wisdom, Mars into War, and 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 the highest qualities of the great ancient masters. The words bard and inspiration, which seems so cold and affected when applied to other modern writers, have a perfect propriety when applied to him. He was not an author, but a bard. 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. But, alas, ὁ Δάφνις ἔβα ροον ̓ ἕηυσε δίνα Υὸν Μωσαις φιλον άνδρα, τὸν ὀν Νύμφαισιν ἀπεκθῆ -MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1831, Southey's Edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, Edinburgh Review, vol. 54, p. 454. Read the "Prometheus Unbound." How gorgeous it is! I do not think Shelley is read or appreciated now as enthusiastically as he was, even in my recollection, some few years ago. . . At home spent my time in reading Shelley. How wonderful and beautiful the "Prometheus" is! The unguessed heavens and earth and sea are so many storehouses from which Shelley brings gorgeous heaps of treasure and piles them in words like jewels. I read "The Sensitive Plant" and "Rosalind and Helen." As for the latter-powerful enough, certainly it gives me bodily aches to read such poetry.-KEMBLE, FRANCES ANN, 1832, Records of a Girlhood, Jan. 25, 27, pp. 496, 498. Sun-treader, life and light be thine for ever! Thou art gone from us; years go by and spring Gladdens and the young earth is beautiful, Hath sat regardless of neglect and scorn, But thou art still for me who have adored The imaginative feelings of Byron and Shelley had but little similitude: those of Shelley were mystical and clouded; those of Byron, clear, distinct, direct, and bold. Shelley was more theoretical and abstract; "The Ode to the Skylark" and "The Cloud," which, 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.-SHELLEY, MARY GODWIN, 1839, ed. Shelley's Poetical Works, Preface. If Coleridge is the sweetest of our poets, Shelley is at once the most ethereal and most gorgeous; the one who has clothed his thoughts in draperies of the most evanescent and most magnificent words and imagery. Not Milton himself is more learned in Grecisms, or nicer in etymological propriety; and nobody, throughout, has a style so Orphic and primæval. His poetry is as full of mountains, seas, and skies, of light, and darkness, and the seasons, and all the elements of our being, as if Nature herself had written it, with the creation and its hopes newly cast around her; not, it must be confessed, without too indiscriminate a mixture of great and small, and a want of sufficient shade,—a certain chaotic brilliancy, "dark with excess of light."-HUNT, LEIGH, 1844, Imagination and Fancy, p. 268. And Shelley, in his white ideal -BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1844, Had Shelley possessed humor, his might have been the third name in English poetry.-WHIPPLE, EDWIN P., 1845, Wit and Humor, Literature and Life, p. 112. If ever mortal "wreaked his thoughts upon expression," it was Shelley. If ever poet sang (as a bird sings) impulsively, earnestly, with utter abandonment, to himself solely, and for the mere joy of his own song, that poet was the author of the "Sensitive Plant." Of art beyond that which is the inalienable instinct of genius he either had little or disdained all. He really disdained that Rule which is the emanation from Law, because his own soul was law in itself. His rhapsodies are but the rough notes, the stenographic memoranda of poems,-memoranda which, because they were all-sufficient for his own intelligence, he cared not to be at the trouble of transcribing in full for mankind. In his whole life he wrought not thoroughly out a single conception. For this reason it is that he is the most fatiguing of poets. Yet he wearies in having done too little, rather than too much; what seems in him the diffuseness of one idea, is the conglomerate concision of many; and this concision it is which renders him obscure. With such a man, to imitate was out of the question; it would have answered no purpose-for he spoke to his own spirit alone, which would have comprehended no alien. tongue; he was, therefore, profoundly original.-POE, EDGAR ALLAN, 1845? Miss Barrett's "A Drama of Exile," Works of Poe, ed. Stedman and Woodberry, vol. VI, p. 317. Most purely poetic genius of his age. -HOWITT, WILLIAM, 1846, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, vol. I, p. 494. I turn to one whom I love still more than I admire; the gentle, the gifted, the illfated Shelley. Poor Shelley! Thou were the warmest of philanthropists, yet doomed to live at variance with thy country and thy time. Full of the spirit of genuine Christianity, yet ranking thyself among unbelievers, because in early life thou hadst been bewildered by seeing it perverted, sinking beneath those precious gifts which should have made a world thine own, intoxicated with thy lyric enthusiasm and thick-coming fancies, adoring Nature as a goddess, yet misinterpreting her oracles, cut off from life just as thou wert beginning to read it aright; O, most musical, most melancholy singer; who that has a soul to feel genius, a heart to grieve over misguided nobleness, can forbear watering the profuse blossoms of thy too early closed spring with tears of sympathy, of love, and (if we may dare it for one so superior in intellect) of pity?—OSSOLI, MARGARET FULLER, 1850? Art, Literature and the Drama, p. 78. It is needless to disguise the fact, and it accounts for all-his mind was diseased: he never knew, even from boyhood, what it was to breathe the atmosphere of healthy life, to have the mens sana in corpore sano. His sensibilities were overacute; his morality was thoroughly morbid; his metaphysical speculations illogical, incongruous, incomprehensible-alike baseless and objectless. The suns and systems of his universe were mere nebulæ; his continents were a chaos of dead matter; his oceans "a world of waters, and without a shore." It is gratuitous absurdity to call his mystical speculations a search after truth; they are no such thing; and are as little worth the attention of reasoning and responsible man as the heterogeneous reveries of nightmare. -MOIR, D. M., 1850-51, Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century. I would rather consider Shelley's poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Diety, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal, than I would isolate and separately appraise the worth of many detachable portions which might be acknowledged as utterly perfect in a lower moral of view, under the mere conditions of art.BROWNING, ROBERT, 1851, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Introductory Essay. See'st thou a Skylark whose glistening winglets ascending Quiver like pulses beneath the melodious dawn? Deep in the heart-yearning distance of heaven it flutters- Wisdom and beauty and love are the treas- In a literary point of view, there is no doubt but every succeeding poem showed the gradual clearing away of the mists and vapors with which, in spite of his exquisite rhythm, and a thousand beauties of detail, his fine genius was originally clouded. MITFORD, MARY RUSSELL, 1851, Recollections of a Literary Life, p. 315. Nature baptized him in ethereal fire, And Death shall crown him with a wreath of flame. HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL, 1853, After a Lecture on Shelley. And it is worth remarking, that it is Shelley's form of fever, rather than Byron's, which has been of late years the prevailing epidemic. Since Shelley's poems have become known in England, and a timid public, after approaching in fear and trembling the fountain which was understood to be poisoned, has begun first to sip, and then, finding the magic water at all events sweet enough, to quench its thirst with unlimited draughts, the Byron's Head has lost its customers. Well at least the taste of the age is more refined, if that be matter of congratulation. And there is an excuse for preferring eau sucré to waterside porter, heady with grains of paradise and quassia, salt and coccum indicum. Among the many good-going gentleman and ladies, Byron is generally spoken of with horrorhe is "so wicked," forsooth; while poor Shelley, "poor dear Shelley," is "very wrong, of course," but "so refined," "so beautiful," "so tender"-a fallen angel, while Byron is a satyr and a devil. boldly deny the verdict. Neither of the two are devils; as for angels, when we have seen one, we shall be better able to give an opinion; at present, Shelley is in our eyes far less like one of those old Hebrews and Miltonic angels, fallen or unfallen, than Byron is. And as for the satyr, the less that is said for Shelley, on that point, the better. If Byron sinned more desperately and flagrantly than he, it was done under the temptations of rank, wealth, disappointed love, and under the impulses of an animal nature, to which Shelley's passions were We As moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine. And, at all events, Byron never set to work to consecrate his own sin into a religion, and proclaim the worship of uncleanness as the last and highest ethical development of "pure" humanity. No-Byron may be brutal, but he never cants. If at moments he finds himself in hell, he never turns round to the world, and melodiously informs them that it is heaven, if they could but see it in its true light.KINGSLEY, CHARLES, 1853, Thoughts about Shelley and Byron, Fraser's Magazine, vol. 48, p. 570. Melodious Shelley caught thy softest song, And they who heard his music heard not thine; Gentle and joyous, delicate and strong, From the far tomb his voice shall silence mine. -LANDOR, WALTER SAVAGE, 1853, To the Nightingale. Through cloud and wave and star his insight keen Shone clear, and traced a God in each disguise, Protean, boundless. Like the busk ined scene All Nature rapt him into ecstasies: In him, alas! had Reverence equal been With Admiration, those resplendent eyes Had wandered not through all her range sublime To miss the one great marvel of all time. -DE VERE, AUBREY, 1856, Lines Composed Near Shelley's House at Lerici. It is impossible to deny that he loved with a great intensity; yet it was with a certain narrowness, and therefore a certain fitfulness. Possibly a somewhat wider nature, taking hold of other characters at more points,-fascinated as intensely but more variously, stirred as deeply but through more complicated emotions, is requisite for the highest and most lasting feeling; passion, to be enduring, must be many-sided. Eager and narrow emotions urge like the gadfly of the poet, but they pass away; they are single; there is nothing to revive them. Various as human nature must be the passion which absorbs that nature into itself. Shelley's mode of delineating women has a corresponding peculiarity; they are well described, but they are described under only one aspect. Every one of his poems, almost, has a lady whose arms are white, whose mind is sympathizing, and whose soul is beautiful. She has many names,-Cythna, Asia, Emily; but these are only external disguises; she is indubitably the same person, for her character never varies. No character can be simpler; she is described as the ideal object of love in its most simple and elemental form; the pure object of the essential passion. She is a being to be loved in a single moment, with eager eyes and gasping breath; but you feel that in that moment you have seen the whole,— there is nothing to come to afterwards. The fascination is intense, but uniform; there is not the ever-varying grace, the ever-changing charm, that alone can attract for all time the shifting moods of a various and mutable nature.-BAGEHOT, WALTER, 1856, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Works, ed. Morgan, vol. 1, p. 117. Let it not be supposed that I mean to compare the sickly dreaming of Shelley over clouds and waves with the masculine and magnificent grasp of men and things which we find in Scott.-RUSKIN, JOHN, 1856, Modern Painters, pt. iii, sec. ii. ch. iv, note. Intense as is his ethical spirit, his desire to act upon man and society, his imagination cannot work with things as he finds them, with the actual stuff of historical life. His mode of thinking is not according to the terrestrial conditions of time, place, cause and effect, variety of race, climate, and costume. His persons are shapes, winged forms, modernized versions of Grecian mythology, or mortals highly allegorized; and their movements are vague, swift, and independent of ordinary physical laws. In the "Revolt of Islam," for example, the story is that of two lovers who career through the plains and cities of an imaginary kingdom on a Tartar horse, or skim over leagues of ocean in a boat whose prow is of moonstone. But for the Cenci, and one or two other pieces, one would say that Shelley had scarcely any aptitude for the historical. -MASSON, DAVID, 1860-74, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Other Essays, p. 140. Florence to the living Dante was not more cruelly unjust than England to the living Shelley. Only now, nearly forty years after his death, do we begin to discern his true glory. It is well that this glory is such as can afford to wait for recognition; that it is one of the permanent stars of heaven, not a rocket to be ruined by a night of storm and rain. I confess that I have long been filled with astonishment and indignation at the manner in which he is treated by the majority of our best living writers. Emerson is serenely throned above hearing him at all; Carlyle only hears him "shriek hysterically;" Mrs. Browning discovers him "blind with |