probability. The boldest fancies of the German romancists are but dry prose in comparison with this confused and confusing poem. Shelley has once succeeded in drawing a clear portrait, whose features remind us of Dante and Michael Angelo; we allude to his description of the plague after the war (Canto VI., stanzas 46-53). Julian and Maddalo (1818) is an idealised conversation between Julian (Shelley) and Maddalo (Byron) on the power of the human will. It is rich in single passages of wondrous beauty; but, taken as a whole, its merits vary considerably. The Lines written among the Euganean Hills are lyrical creations of fancy, and unspeakable charm of language, somewhat in the style of Childe Harold. His last three great poems are devoted to the contemplation of the nature and immortality of the soul. The Sensitive Plant (1820), written in a simple metre, is probably the most lovely piece that any poet has ever written on belief in immortality. He presents to our notice a splendid garden, and a beautiful lady who tends it; the lady dies, and the garden goes to ruin; but after describing its sad desolation, the poem ends thus :—

Whether the sensitive plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a spirit sat
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say.

Whether that Lady's gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
Found sadness where it left delight,

I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that Lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed, not they.

For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.

Epipsychidion (1821) is the passionate expression of the pure love felt by Shelley in his inmost soul for an unfortunate Italian lady of rank. It is a piece of fervent, heart-felt poetry, and most tender, both in language and thought. Shelley himself compared it with the preface to Dante's Vita Nuova, and not without some justification.

In Adonais (1821) Shelley sang a touching dirge to the poet John Keats, who died at the age of twenty-four (see p. 396). In this wonderful poem also, which is written in Spenserian stanzas, the thought of the immortality of all that is spiritual and beautiful is worked out with great effect (stanzas 39-43). Shelley sketches in stanzas 31-3 a remarkable portrait of himself:

Midst others of less note, came one frail Form

A phantom among men; companionless

As the last cloud of an expiring storm

Whose thunder is its knell. He, as I guess,

Has gazed on Nature's naked loveliness,
Acteon-like; and now he fled astray

With feeble steps o'er the world's Wilderness,

And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.

A pard-like Spirit beautiful and swift

A Love in desolation masked-a Power
Girt round with weakness; it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour;
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,

A breaking billow;-even whilst we speak

Is it not broken? On the withering flower

The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek

The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.

In order to judge of Shelley as a dramatist, we must not consult Prometheus Unbound (1819), which is entirely a lyrical drama, although in its way superior to most of his poetry; but The Cenci (1819). He who has commenced the study of Shelley with his lyric and epic poems will experience the greatest surprise in reading The Cenci. This softhearted visionary, this elf-like spirit, resembling Ariel in Shakespeare's Tempest, this lyric poet, so unfettered both as regards his sentiments and his language, has in The Cenci produced a tragedy far beyond any that has appeared in England since Shakespeare's time; it is perhaps the last great tragedy of modern dramas since Schiller's death. In his lyric and epic poems Shelley could never do himself justice; in The Cenci he practised a self-restraint, which shows him to be a master. Both as regards his subject and the language he employs, we find a tension, which reminds us of a human body quivering on the rack. The story is indeed a terrible one! The daughter of the wicked old Count Francesco Cenci, Beatrice Cenci, who is known, if not through Shelley, by a world-famed picture at Rome, murders, with the help of her stepmother and her brothers, the wretched old father, at whose hands she has suffered nameless things. It is most painful to read the piece; but it rivets our attention firmly. The character of Beatrice, developing from act to act; her dire resolve to do the deed, her

1 More recent inquiries have placed it beyond a doubt that the beautiful portrait in the Barberini Palace is not the work of Guido Reni: nor does it represent Beatrice Cenci. The whole question of the Cenci is treated in the last work of Bertolotti Francesco Cenci e le sua famiglia.

haughty carriage before the Papal tribunal, the transient feeling of terror which comes upon her at the thought of dying in the bloom of youth, and then her majestic calmness at the sight of the scaffold; again, the scenes in which the old monster Cenci makes known his diabolical villainy: the piece is only equalled in its sublimity by Shakespeare. This is the truth, without exaggeration, and it was but due to the poet to state it once for all.

Except Act IV., the beginning of which is not on a level with the rest, The Cenci is a remarkably effective play. As a first attempt, the dramatic art displayed in it is wonderful. The piece has never been represented on account of the terrible nature of the story: and yet it may be said that the tender style in which Shelley treats the most fearful subjects might make its representation possible. If played before a choice public of great tragic artists, the piece could not but make an ineffaceable impression. Its classical impersonality distinguishes it from all Shelley's other poems; it was his full intention to paint men and women of the Italian Renaissance, and his Francesco Cenci reminds us of the portrait sketched by Taine in his description of Napoleon I. as a successor of the despots of the Renaissance period. Since Shakespeare's Richard III. or Iago, or since about the time of Webster and Fletcher, no tragedy conceived in this most sublime tone has appeared on the English stage. It was like a late and isolated blazing-up of the volcanic power of the period of the dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare. We are also reminded of the matricide in Sophocles' Electra: here is a short extract from Act V., scene 4 :——

Camillo.

Beatrice.

May God in heaven be less inexorable

To the Pope's prayers than he has been to mine!
Here is the sentence and the warrant.

O my God! Can it be possible I have
To die so suddenly? so young to go

Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground?
To be nailed down into a narrow place;

To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more
Blithe voice of living thing; muse not again
Upon familiar thoughts,-sad, yet thus lost

How fearful! To be nothing! or to be-

What? Oh where am I? Let me not go mad!

Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
No God, no heaven, no earth, in the void world,

The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!
If all things then should be my father's spirit,
His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me,
The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!
If, sometimes, as a shape more like himself,
Even the form which tortured me on earth,
Masked in grey hairs and wrinkles he should come,
And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix

His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down!

The guards approach, Beatrice goes to her death with her stepmother and her brother; a ray of love falls on the last scene:—

Shelley's great dramatic talent appears also in a fragment he has left of an historical tragedy entitled Charles the First; it contains some highly characteristic scenes of genuine dramatic movement.

At Shelley's death England lost its last dramatist, and its best lyric poet. In the history of English literature Shelley stands alone; his poetic style was not of the kind calculated to form a school. It was not easy of imitation; even his sympathy with the revolutionary movement at the beginning of the century is expressed in his verses in so peculiar a form that Shelley, and no other, appears to utter it.

Shelley's fame as a poet is undisputed at the present day. The "Crucify him!" and "Stone him!" of seventy years ago has been succeeded by a real enthusiasm for him. The moral indignation which was then felt against him is also dead; and the poet to whom the highest English judge once refused permission to educate his own children is now honoured without prejudice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Editions by Rossetti, Forman; last edition by Woodberry (Boston, 1893); Shelley's Letters, by Garnett; Todhunter, A Study of Shelley; T. Medwin, The Shelley Papers; the same, The Life of Shelley; G. S. Middleton, Shelley and his Writings; D. F. MacCarthy, Shelley's Early Life; R. Browning, An Essay on Shelley; E. J. Trelawney, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron; W. M. Rossetti, A Memoir of Shelley; H. B. Forman, The Shelley Library; G. B. Smith, Shelley, a Critical Biography; J. A. Symonds, Shelley (in English Men of Letters); H. Druskowitz, Shelley; J. C. Jeaffreson, The Real Shelley; E. Dowden, The Life of Shelley; W. Shairp, The Life of Shelley; Lady Shelley, Shelley Memorials; Biagi, Gli ultimi giorni di Shelley; G. Brandes, Shelley und Byron; Publications of the Shelley Society; T. S. Ellis (Kelmscott Press).

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CHAPTER III

BYRON'S CONTEMPORARIES

2. KEATS-LEIGH HUNT-LANDOR-MOORE

HE poets mentioned in this chapter were more or less influenced by Byron's artistic skill, though they did not form a "school" with him. Like Shelley, they were of too independent a nature to be imitators. But they are akin to Byron in passion and in warmth of feeling and expression. Byron was personally acquainted with some of them, and took a lively interest in the literary labours of them all, more especially in Keats.

JOHN KEATS was born in London, 1795, and died at Rome (1821) of consumption, at the age of twenty-six. The poems he has left fill a moderate-sized volume, and its contents do not justify the opinion that he was already a great poet at the time of his death. But we cannot read him without regretting the future which was undeniably in store for him as a poet. An anecdote has repeatedly been told of him that his death was caused by a vile, malicious attack in the Quarterly Review, reflecting on his personal character. In his Adonais, Shelley has held up the critics to the scorn of posterity in some stanzas of terrible power. The truth is that Keats was already hopelessly ill when he went to Italy, and that he survived the appearance of this disgraceful critique for some weeks. He had that pride which is so common with clever men of humble origin. So powerfully convinced was he that poetry was his vocation that he wrote: "I have not the slightest feeling of humility towards the public." "I never wrote one single line of poetry with the least shadow of public thought." think I shall be among the English poets after my death." And yet he chose as his epitaph these words :

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

He lies in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, not far from the stone of Shelley.