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speech, a diction sometimes really poetical, but no mastery of drama, either as life or as form. In lines like these,

'If that ye cast us to the winds, the winds

Will give us their unruly restless nature;

We whirl and whirl; and where we settle, Fazio,
But he that ruleth the mad winds can know,'

there is a suggestion never fully realised, of sensitive dramatic speech.

The three Biblical plays, "The Fall of Jerusalem,' 'The Martyr of Antioch,' and 'Belshazzar,' are almost equally pompous, lifeless, and artificial. Frigid blank verse, sometimes strained and gaudy, sometimes dragging with it heavy loads of false sentiment, alternates with rhymed verse, brought in for no sufficient reason, and producing no effect even of relief. The author assures us, but needlessly, that his plays were not intended for the stage. They were read and admired in their day for what was supposed to be a kind of 'classical' merit. The 'Quarterly Review,' reviewing 'The Fall of Jerusalem' in 1820, and rebuking Shelley for having, in 'The Cenci,' 'expected to afford mankind delight by a facsimile of unmingled wickedness and horror,' goes on to say that the clerical author had produced a poem, 'to which, without extravagant encomium, it is not unsafe to promise whatever immortality the English language can bestow.' To-day all three lie bound like mummies, warning us against the death of reputations.

REV. CHARLES WOLFE (1791-1823) 1

WOLFE is remembered by one poem, 'The Burial of Sir John Moore,' in which he competes with Campbell, and goes beyond

1 Remains of the late Rev. Charles Wolfe, A. B., Curate of Bomoughmore, Diocese of Armagh; with a brief Memoir of his Life, by the Rev. John A. Russell, M. A., Archdeacon of Clogher, 1825.

at all events the poem which he chiefly admired, 'Hohenlinden.' He did nothing really good besides this poem, but it was the outcome of a nature in which poetry germinated. Everything we are told about his short and attractive life shows us a sensitive temperament, very much under the influence of music, and a mind of intense but strictly limited concentration, capable of momentary absorption, but no more. He was, within his limits, a careful artist; and even when he seems to imitate Moore or other bad models he is for the most part working on a genuine, though faint and transitory, impulse, like those lines, whose pathos is taken straight from the natural pathos of an Irish air, which 'he had sung over and over till he burst into tears, in which mood he composed the words.' Thus the one poem in which he is perfectly successful is no happy and inexplicable accident, but the culmination of all his qualities as an artist. He distrusted his own impulse, and only once met with a subject which so completely possessed him that it gave substance to his material and gravity to his style. There is in this poem, which is one of the most simple and direct poems of the kind in any language, a touch which links it with the characteristic Irish lyric, the line:

'And we far away on the billow.'

The epithets, 'distant and random,' 'sullenly,' are precise and unusual; and from beginning to end there is what poems of the sort usually lack, atmosphere. It has a masculine tenderness which no doubt was largely what made Byron divine in it, as it floated anonymously about the country, a thing 'little inferior to the best which the present prolific age has brought forth.'

1

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822) 1

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'I HAVE the vanity to write only for poetical minds,' Shelley said to Trelawny, 'and must be satisfied with few readers.' 'I am, and I desire to be, nothing,' he wrote to Leigh Hunt, while urging him to 'assume a station in modern literature which the universal voice of my contemporaries forbids me either to stoop or to aspire to.' Yet he said also, 'Nothing is more difficult and unwelcome than to write without a confidence of finding readers'; and, 'It is impossible to compose except under the strong excitement of an assurance of finding sympathy in what you write.' Of the books which he published during his lifetime, some were published without his name, some were suppressed at the very moment of publication. Only 'The Cenci' went into a second edition. Without readers, he was without due recognition from the poets of his time. we may not. q. Byron was jealous, if we may believe Trelawny, but neither Keats nor Wordsworth nor Leigh Hunt nor Southey nor Landor seems ever to have considered him seriously as a rival. We must go to the enthusiastic unimportant Wilson, to find an adequate word of praise; for to Wilson 'Mr. Shelley was a poet, almost in the very highest sense of that mysterious word.'

1 (1) Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire, 1810. (2) Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, 1810. (3) The Devil's Walk, a broadside, 1812. (4) Queen Mab, 1813, 1821. (5) Alastor, 1816. (6) Laon and Cythna, 1818. (7) The Revolt of Islam, 1818. (8) Rosalind and Helen, 1819. (9) The Cenci, 1819. (10) Prometheus Unbound, 1820. (11) Edipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant, 1820. (12) Adonais, 1820. (13) Epipsychidion, 1821. (14) Hellas, 1822. (15) Poetical Pieces, 1823. (16) Posthumous Poems, 1824. (17) The Masque of Anarchy, 1832. (18) The Shelley Papers, prose and verse, 1833. (19) Poetical Works, edited by Mrs. Shelley, 1839. (20) Relics of Shelley, edited by Dr. Garnett, 1862. (21) The Dæmon of the World, edited by H. B. Forman, 1876. (22) Poetical Works, edited by H. B. Forman, 8 vols., 1876-80.

The general public hated him without reading him, and even his death did not raise him from oblivion. But Time has been on his side, and to-day the general reader, if you mention the word poet to him, thinks of Shelley.

It is only by reading contemporary writings and opinions in published letters of the time, -such as Southey's when he writes to Shelley, that the manner in which his powers for poetry 'have been employed is such as to prevent me from feeling any desire to see more of productions so monstrous in their kind, and pernicious in their tendency,' - that we can, with a great effort, realise the aspect under which Shelley appeared to the people of his time. What seems to us abnormal in its innocence was to them abnormal in guilt; they imagined a revolution behind every invocation to liberty, and saw Godwin charioted in the clouds of 'Prometheus Unbound.' They saw nothing else there, and Shelley himself had moments when he thought that his mission was a prophet's rather than a poet's. All this, which would mean so little to-day, kept Shelley at that time from ever having an audience as a poet. England still feared thought, and still looked upon poetry as worth fearing.

No poet has defined his intentions in poetry more carefully than Shelley. "It is the business of the poet,' he said, in the 'preface to 'The Revolt of Islam,' 'to communicate to others the pleasure and the enthusiasm arising out of those images and feelings in the vivid presence of which, within his own mind, consists at once his inspiration and his reward.' But, he says further, 'I would only awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of true virtue, and be incited to those enquiries which have led to my moral and political creed, and that of some of the subtlest intellects in the world.' In the preface to 'Prometheus Unbound' he says, 'Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in vein. My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarise the highly re

fined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence.' Writing to Godwin, he says acutely, 'My power consists in sympathy, and that part of the imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation..... I am formed I am formed . . . to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole.' And we are told by Mrs. Shelley that 'he said that he deliberated at one time whether he should dedicate himself to poetry or metaphysics.'

Shelley was born to be a poet, and his 'passion for reforming the world,' as well as what he fancied to be his turn for metaphysics, were both part of a temperament and intelligence perhaps more perfectly fitted for the actual production of poetry than those of any other poet. All his life Shelley was a dreamer; never a visionary. We imagine him, like his Asia on the pinnacle, saying,

'my brain

Grows dizzy: see'st thou shapes within the mist?'

The mist, to Shelley, was part of what he saw; he never saw anything, in life or art, except through a mist. Blake lived in a continual state of vision, Shelley in a continual state of hallucination. What Blake saw was what Shelley wanted to see; Blake never dreamed, but Shelley never wakened out of that shadow of a dream which was his life.

His poetry is indeed made out of his life; but what was his life to Shelley? The least visible part of his dreams. As the Fourth Spirit sings in 'Prometheus Unbound,' –

'Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,

But feeds on the aërial kisses

Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.'

He lived with ardour among ideas, aspirations, and passions in which there was something at once irresponsible and abstract. He followed every impulse, without choice or restraint,

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