and shows the naked poetry.

* * * * *

It is this gift of not merely embodying but apprehending everything in figure which co-operates towards creating his rarest characteristics, so almost preternaturally developed in no other poet, namely, his well-known power to condense the most hydrogenic abstraction.  Science can now educe threads of such exquisite tenuity that only the feet of the tiniest infant-spiders can ascend them; but up the filmiest insubstantiality Shelley runs with agile ease.  To him, in truth, nothing is abstract.  The dustiest abstractions

Start, and tremble under his feet,
And blossom in purple and red.

The coldest moon of an idea rises haloed through his vaporous imagination.  The dimmest-sparked chip of a conception blazes and scintillates in the subtile oxygen of his mind.  The most wrinkled Æson of an abstruseness leaps rosy out of his bubbling genius.  In a more intensified signification than it is probable that Shakespeare dreamed of, Shelley gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.  Here afresh he touches the Metaphysical School, whose very title was drawn from this habitual pursuit of abstractions, and who failed in that pursuit from the one cause omnipresent with them, because in all their poetic smithy they had left never a place for a forge.  They laid their fancies chill on the anvil.  Crashaw, indeed, partially anticipated Shelley’s success, and yet further did a later poet, so much further that we find it difficult to understand why a generation that worships Shelley should be reviving Gray, yet almost forget the name of Collins.  The generality of readers, when they know him at all, usually know him by his Ode on the Passions.  In this, despite its beauty, there is still a soupçon of formalism, a lingering trace of powder from the eighteenth century periwig, dimming the bright locks of poetry.  Only the literary student reads that little masterpiece, the Ode to Evening, which sometimes heralds the Shelleian strain, while other passages are the sole things in the language comparable to the miniatures of Il Penseroso.  Crashaw, Collins, Shelley—three ricochets of the one pebble, three jets from three bounds of the one Pegasus!  Collins’s Pity, “with eyes of dewy light,” is near of kin to Shelley’s Sleep, “the filmy-eyed”; and the “shadowy tribes of mind” are the lineal progenitors of “Thought’s crowned powers.”  This, however, is personification, wherein both Collins and Shelley build on Spenser: the dizzying achievement to which the modern poet carried personification accounts for but a moiety, if a large moiety, of his vivifying power over abstractions.  Take the passage (already alluded to) in that glorious chorus telling how the Hours come

   From the temples high
   Of man’s ear and eye
Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy,

* * * * *

   From those skiey towers
   Where Thought’s crowned powers
Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours!
   Our feet now, every palm,
   Are sandalled with calm,
And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm;
   And beyond our eyes
   The human love lies
Which makes all it gazes on Paradise.

Any partial explanation will break in our hands before it reaches the root of such a power.  The root, we take it, is this.  He had an instinctive perception (immense in range and fertility, astonishing for its delicate intuition) of the underlying analogies the secret subterranean passages, between matter and soul; the chromatic scales, whereat we dimly guess, by which the Almighty modulates through all the keys of creation.  Because, the more we consider it, the more likely does it appear that Nature is but an imperfect actress, whose constant changes of dress never change her manner and method, who is the same in all her parts.

To Shelley’s ethereal vision the most rarified mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the sand of outward things.  He stood thus at the very junction-lines of the visible and invisible, and could shift the points as he willed.  His thoughts became a mounted infantry, passing with baffling swiftness from horse to foot or foot to horse.  He could express as he listed the material and the immaterial in terms of each other.  Never has a poet in the past rivalled him as regards this gift, and hardly will any poet rival him as regards it in the future: men are like first to see the promised doom lay its hand on the tree of heaven and shake down the golden leaves. {7}

The finest specimens of this faculty are probably to be sought in that Shelleian treasury, Prometheus Unbound.  It is unquestionably the greatest and most prodigal exhibition of Shelley’s powers, this amazing lyric world, where immortal clarities sigh past in the perfumes of the blossoms, populate the breathings of the breeze, throng and twinkle in the leaves that twirl upon the bough; where the very grass is all a-rustle with lovely spirit-things, and a weeping mist of music fills the air.  The final scenes especially are such a Bacchic reel and rout and revelry of beauty as leaves one staggered and giddy; poetry is spilt like wine, music runs to drunken waste.  The choruses sweep down the wind, tirelessly, flight after flight, till the breathless soul almost cries for respite from the unrolling splendours.  Yet these scenes, so wonderful from a purely poetical standpoint that no one could wish them away, are (to our humble thinking) nevertheless the artistic error of the poem.  Abstractedly, the development of Shelley’s idea required that he should show the earthly paradise which was to follow the fall of Zeus.  But dramatically with that fall the action ceases, and the drama should have ceased with it.  A final chorus, or choral series, of rejoicings (such as does ultimately end the drama where Prometheus appears on the scene) would have been legitimate enough.  Instead, however, the bewildered reader finds the drama unfolding itself through scene after scene which leaves the action precisely where it found it, because there is no longer an action to advance.  It is as if the choral finale of an opera were prolonged through two acts.

We have, nevertheless, called Prometheus Shelley’s greatest poem because it is the most comprehensive storehouse of his power.  Were we asked to name the most perfect among his longer efforts, we should name the poem in which he lamented Keats: under the shed petals of his lovely fancy giving the slain bird a silken burial.  Seldom is the death of a poet mourned in true poetry.  Not often is the singer coffined in laurel-wood.  Among the very few exceptions to such a rule, the greatest is Adonais.  In the English language only Lycidas competes with it; and when we prefer Adonais to Lycidas, we are following the precedent set in the case of Cicero: Adonais is the longer.  As regards command over abstraction, it is no less characteristically Shelleian than Prometheus.  It is throughout a series of abstractions vitalised with daring exquisiteness, from Morning who sought:

Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,

and who

Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day,

to the Dreams that were the flock of the dead shepherd, the Dreams

Whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed; and whom he taught
The love that was its music;

of whom one sees, as she hangs mourning over him,

Upon the silken fringe of his faint eyes,
Like dew