great poems are written, will find in this one neither meaning nor feeling within their reach, though they may find many delightful lines and sweet cadences. It is as a piece of music only, that we feel ourselves capable of considering it; and music, as we are all aware, is by no means obliged to have any soul of articulate signification. It is amusing and comforting to ourselves to find that even Mr. Rossetti shares our sense of confusion, and gets rid of this work in the fewest possible words, with vague and grand applauses, which do not mean much. We follow his example with a certain relief. Henceforward Shelley, growing into something like maturity, began to perceive that a meaning which could be grasped by the common mind was an advantage; and we may at once proceed to his two most notable poems, without following the rigid course of chronology.

The "Prometheus" seems to have been the first in time, as it is the greatest in power. It was written in Rome, chiefly in the gigantic ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, in that sweet spring of Italy, which is the very spring-time of the poets, full of inspiration, amid all the wild new life of flowery vegetation, and the old stubborn grandeur of those unformed yet imperishable relics of the past. The scene was one which might have suited some old tale of Rome herself, in those days when she was mistress of the world. But Shelley's genius was not historical, and with a growing fascination he had been contemplating this vast subject, already limned upon his canvas for him by the great artists of Greece. It is, as we have already said, the very climax and highest point of his philosophythe incarnation of heroic resistance, the highest human principle of which Shelley had any conception. It is impossible to deny to this wonderful production the title of a great poem. It is one of the most vivid pictures ever done in words—a ghostly, terrible tableau, illumined with pale lights which are not of this world, and surrounded by a vast colorless horizon, against which a few great figures rise awful in the majestic twilight-Prometheus himself in deathless suffering and courage, the solemn form of Earth, and the white spirits which stand about consoling or explaining. The music of his verse, which up to this time has been his great charm, becomes at once secondary when we are brought in face of this

great spectacle. Hitherto we have listened, and sometimes found the sweetness cloying, and the melody monotonous. But here, once, and once only, a gift of another description evolves itself, and the poet draws his curtain proudly and bids us see. The first act, up to the moment when the Earth introduces her choristers to console the sufferer, is thoroughly fine and noble. The story is too well-known to want re-telling. Prometheus bound upon his rock, with a vulture gnawing his heart, defies the power of the tyrant god Jupiter; and, secure of the arrival of a time when his oppressor shall be hurled from his throne, waits with awful patience, enduring every torture till his deliverance comes. Nothing could well be more splendid of its kind than the opening scene.

PROMETHEUS.

Monarch of Gods and Demons, and all Spirits-
But One who throng those bright and rolling
worlds
Which thou and I alone of living things
Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this earth
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou
Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise,
With fear and self-contempt and barren hope.
Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate,
Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn,
O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge.
Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,
And moments aye divided by keen pangs,
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair,-these are mine empire:
More glorious far than that which thou surveyest
From thine unenvied throne, O mighty God!
Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here
Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.
Ah me, alas! pain, pain ever, forever!
No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.

And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts,

I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt?

I

ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun,

Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm,
Heaven's ever-changing shadow, spread below,
Have its deaf waves not heard my agony?
Ah me, alas! pain, pain ever, forever!
Of their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chains
The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears
Eat with their burning cold into my bones.
Heaven's winged hound polluting from thy lips
His beak in poison not his own, tears up
My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering
The ghastly people of the realm of dream,
by,
Mocking me; and the earthquake-fiends are
charged

To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds
When the rocks split and close again behind:
While from their loud abysses howling throng
The genii of the storm, urging the rage

Whose many-voiced echoes, through the mists
Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell!
Ye icy springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost,
Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept
Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air,
Through which the sun walks burning without
beams!

And ye swift whirlwinds, who on poised wings
Hung mute and moveless o'er yon hushed abyss,
As thunder, louder than your own, made rock
The orbed world! If then my words had power,
Though I am changed so that aught evil wish
Is dead within; although no memory be
Of what is hate-let them not lose it now!
What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak.

This wonderful reverie has an exaltation and grandeur in it worthy of the representative of humanity. The involuntary cry, "Ah me, alas! pain ever, forever!" which bursts from his lips by times, as it were against his will, gives a reality to the suf fering and the patience, and thrills the reader with that high pang of participation which is the loftiest form of sympathy. There is nothing in this of the pretentious and petty flurry of rebellion. The Divine Rebel is calm in the greatness of his passion and agony-calm, too, in his intense certainty of the change which is coming. The poet, no doubt, would have been deeply astonished had he been told that this attitude, of which he so fully feels the supreme grandeur, is the very attitude of that Faith against which he rails with so much fury. For, potent and subtle as his perceptions were, his range of vision was very limited, and more warped by prejudice than it is easy to express. But it is this deepening and widening of the sphere around him, this glimpse of the profounder spiritual emotions, which give power to his greatest conception. The following high colloquy between the Earth and her suffering son and representative is equally

fine. He has asked to hear once more his own curse, and has been answered from the mountains and winds and waters that none of them dare repeat those terrible words.

THE EARTH.

I am the Earth, Thy mother; she within whose stony veins To the last fibre of the loftiest tree, Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air, Joy ran, as blood within a living frame, When thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud Of glory arise, a spirit of keen joy! And at thy voice her pining sons uplifted Their prostrate brows from the polluting dust, And our Almighty Tyrant with fierce dread Grew pale-until his thunder chained thee here. Then-see those million worlds which burn and roll

Around us their inhabitants beheld

My sphered light wave in wide Heaven; the sea
Was lifted by strange tempests, and new fire
From earthquake-rifted mountains of bright snow,
Shook its portentous hair beneath heaven's frown;
Lightning and inundation vexed the plains;
Blue thistles bloomed in cities; foodless toads
Within voluptuous chambers panting crawled;
When Plague had fallen on man, and beast, and
worm,

And Famine; and black blight on herb and tree;
And in the corn, and vines, and meadow-grass,
Teemed ineradicable poisonous weeds,
Draining their growth, for my wan breast was dry
With grief; and the thin air, my breath, was
stained

With the contagion of a mother's hate

Thy curse, the which, if thou rememberest not,
Breathed on her child's destroyer; ay, I heard
Yet my innumerable seas and streams,
Mountains, and caves, and winds, and yon wide
air,

Preserve, a treasured spell. We meditate
And the inarticulate people of the dead,
In secret joy and hope those dreadful words,
But dare not speak them.

They shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dear child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One that which thou beholdest; but the other
The shadows of all forms that think and live
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
Till death unite them, and they part no more;
Dreams and the light imaginings of men,
And all that faith creates or love desires,
Terrible, strange, sublime or beauteous shapes.
There thou art, and dost hang a writhing shade.
'Mid whirlwind-peopled mountains; all the gods

Vast, sceptred phantoms; heroes, men, and beasts;

And Demogorgon, a tremendous gloom;
And he, the Supreme Tyrant, on his throne
Of burning gold. Son, one of these shall utter
The curse which all remember. Call at will
Thine own ghost, or the ghost of Jupiter,
Hades or Typhon, or what mightier Gods
From all-prolific evil, since thy ruin

Have sprung, and trampled on my prostrate sons.
Ask, and they must reply: so the revenge
Of the Supreme may sweep through vacant

shades,

As rainy wind through the abandoned gate Of a fallen palace.

PROMETHEUS.

Mother, let not aught Of that which may be evil pass again My lips, or those of aught resembling me. Phantom of Jupiter, arise, appear!

We confess that our interest in the poem fails when we come to Asia and Panthea, and seek out Demogorgon on his ebon throne with his attendant Hours—just as our interest always fails when, after the intense strain of a tragedy, we are brought back into the more or less banal and wearisome ways by which every thing is to be mended, and perpetual joy and content to be established in the earth. Neither Shelley nor any other poet can give interest to these vague glories or to the vain phantasmagoria of universal happiness, which always bears a fatal resemblance to a transformation-scene in a pantomime. The grandeur of the "Prometheus" is concentrated in the opening of the poem. It is a great tableau, as we have said, fixed against a pale gleaming sky, with weird songs breathing about it, and a host of shadowy undefined figures hovering around, but always the great victim in the centre of the scene, and the great consoler, patient as himself, the old majestic EarthMother, watching by him. "Ah me, alas! pain ever, forever;" but no sinking of heart, no failure of courage, no change in the heroic patience and determination to endure to the end. How out of all his choruses and semi-choruses, out of his flowery and wordy Revolts of Islam, and all the sweet and petulant maunderings of his youth, Shelley should have dragged himself up to the height of this great conception, it is very difficult to tell. But that he did reach once to this sublime height, and had a glimpse, however brief, of something at once more profound and more lofty than had been hitherto dreamt of in NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVI., No. 1.

his philosophy, is one of his truest titles to the great name of poet.

Of the drama of the "Cenci" we are disposed to form a very different opinion. We admit, however, that we express this with a certain trembling; for even Mr. Rossetti, in this mild age, in a book published only a year ago, stigmatizes one of its unfavorable critics as “a vile and loathsome ruffian," and another as a "vomit of creation," epithets which alarm a peaceable critic. And we are aware that the great number of "the best judges" are against us. Nevertheless, we can not alter our opinion. Setting aside the subject and actual incident, which, to our thinking, are too horrible and revolting for the purposes of tragedy, it seems to us that the poet fails altogether in his conception of his Beatrice. What he intends is to make her an impersonation of maidenly nobleness, purity, fortitude, and strength; such a woman as would die sooner than meet dishonor, yet would endure almost all things for the faine of her house and the safety of those she loves. She is one of those whom pollution would kill, yet whom love would sustain and elevate to the last height of sacrifice. All this is expressed in the noble and spirited address she makes to the astonished company assembled to rejoice with him in honor of a great good fortune, to whom her horrible father has just announced, with much chuckling and self-congratulation, the death of his two sons. As they are dispersing in horror, Beatrice thus bursts forth:

"I do entreat you, go not, noble guests;
What although tyranny and impious hate
Stand sheltered by a father's hoary hair?
What if 'tis he who clothed us in these limbs
Who tortures them and triumphs? What if we,
The desolate and dead, were his own flesh,
His children and his wife, whom he is bound
To love and shelter? Shall we therefore find
No refuge in this merciless wide world?

Oh, think what deep wrongs must have blotted

out

Passionate prayers: and when these were not heard

I have still borne; until I meet you here,
Princes and kinsmen, at this hideous feast,
Given for my brothers' deaths. Two yet re-
main-

His wife remains and I-whom, if you save not,
You may soon share such merriment again
As fathers make over their children's graves."

The girl who ventures to make this speech in her pitiless father's presence is strung to a high pitch of tragic determination before she makes such an appeal, and it is possible that the horror of the crowning outrage to which she is soon after subjected might have driven her mad for the moment. But even her madness ought to have been the madness of strength, and not the confused and hopeless babbling of weakness. Though the fact is continually kept before us that her wrong is too hideous to be told, she nevertheless indicates its nature with such distinctness to her former lover that mistake is scarcely possible-which is surely a poor reading of the distraught soul. After the outrage she consents to her father's murder, and even plans its circumstances, but rather from a desire to escape the future than from any tragic consciousness that the future had come to an end for her. The passionate sense that further life is impossible, which moved the Lucretia of an older story, has no place in this pale Beatrice. No solemn priesthood of vengeance comes upon the outraged woman, as it might have done with the noblest effect and truth to nature. It may be said, indeed, on this point, that Shelley had the bonds of historical fact to restrain him; but fact and truth are two things, and a great dramatic poet could not be so bound by the actual. The Beatrice of the first act would have taken the guilt upon herself and saved her family; but Shelley's Beatrice is not equal to that great height. In the torture-scene her failure is still more apparent. All that she thinks of is escape: whereas any true conception of a lofty character so circumstanced would make the very thought of escape impossible. Every high sentiment requires that such a victim should seek and insist upon that death which is her only refuge. But Beatrice fights for life and deliverance to the very last. She is eloquent and casuistical, and all but wins her cause by her appeal to the feelings of Camillo, and by the still more striking appeal she makes to the terrors of the poor wretch Marzio the bravo,

upon whom she imposes her lie with a splendid assurance which is totally unlike our first conception of her character. The scene is fine, so far as the poetry is concerned.

"Beatrice.-0 thou tremblest on the giddy. verge

Of life and death, pause ere thou answerest me;
So mayst thou answer God with less dismay.
What evil have we done thee? I, alas!
Have lived but on this earth a few sad years;
And so my lot was ordered that a father
First turned the moments of awakening life
To drops each poisoning youth's sweet hope; and

then

Stabbed with one blow my everlasting soul,
And my untainted fame, and even that peace
Which sleeps within the core of the heart's heart;
But the wound was not mortal; so my hate
Became the only worship I could lift
To our great Father, who in pity and love
Armed thee, as thou dost say, to cut him off;
And thus his wrong becomes my accusation!
And art thou the accuser? If thou hop'st
Mercy in heaven, show justice upon earth:
Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.
If thou hast done murders, made thy life's path
Over the trampled laws of God and man,
Rush not before thy Judge, and say, 'My Maker,
I have done this, and more; for there was one
Who was most pure and innocent on earth,
And, because she endured what never any,
Guilty or innocent, endured before,
Because her wrongs could not be told nor thought,
Because thy hand at length did rescue her,
I with my words killed her and all her kin.'
Think, I adjure thee, what it is to slay
The reverence living in the minds of men
Toward our ancient house and stainless fame!
Think what it is to strangle infant Pity,
Cradled in the belief of guileless looks-
Till it become a crime to suffer. Think

What 'tis to blot with infamy and blood
All that which shows like innocence, and is-
Hear me, great God!—I swear most innocent;
So that the world lose all discrimination
And that which now compels thee to reply
Between the sly, fierce, wild regard of guilt,

To what I ask; Am I, or am I not,
A parricide?

Marzio.-Thou art not.
Juage.-

What is this? Marzio.-I here declare those whom I did ac

poor wretch, and compels him to die with a lie on his lips, produces, on the whole, an effect totally different from that which the poet intended. And his failure is of the same character as was his success. It is the involuntary, perhaps unconscious, mingling of noble moral qualities with the immortal resistance of Prometheus which makes that figure sublime. It is the negation of moral qualities which brings Beatrice down from all the advantages of her tragic position. Her lie is a worse death-warrant than any signed by the Pope; and we watch her exit from the world and the stage without any emotion, simply because the poet has chosen to prefer his old bigot-dogma of resistance at all hazards and at any cost, to the far higher principle of personal truth and honor. The failure is great in point of art, in our opinion; it is a willful throwing away of a very noble tragic opportunity; and what perhaps affects the mind as deeply, there seems a certain treachery in it to the dead--treason to that piteous face, half child, half woman, to those pathetic eyes which have wept all the tears of which they are capable, and gaze at us forever from Guido's canvas with that tearless appeal of exhaustion which rends the heart. Few faces are so well known in the world as that worn, sweet, tragic child-countenance of Beatrice. It is the poet who has done this sad soul the last and crowning wrong.

Space forbids us to discuss in detail all Shelley's important productions. There is not one of them, perhaps, in which there is not something beautiful to be found; but we turn with relief and delight from "Rosalind and Helen," "Julian and Maddalo," and other pretentious compositions, to those exquisite minor poems and scraps of verse which are above criticism, alike exquisite in music and perfect in sentiment. Fortunately, for one person who reads the "Cenci," there are a thousand to whom the "Skylark" is a pure and ever-fresh delight; and perhaps the reputation of the poet might be more safely, sweetly, and purely founded upon so much of him as is to be found in Mr. Palgrave's excellent collection, "The Golden Treasury," than in all the more ambitious volumes that bear his name. These love ly verses are above censure, and almost beyond criticism. They have all the beauty of music, with a still loftier intel

lectual charm added which is beyond the reach of music. The ear and the heart are touched alike with a soft rapture when it is thus the poet sings. All other considerations, all thought of his philosophies, or opinions, or faults, or weaknesses, float away from us at the first note of that inineffable wild sweetness. "The Skylark," "The Cloud," (which, however, is less perfect,) a great part of "The Sensitive Plant," the "Lines Written in Dejection," those among the Euganean Hills, and many more-some of which, like the wildflowers and stars, have not even the distinction of a name-are the true charter of Shelley's immortality. By their means we can track the poet's path as we can track the course of an unseen brook by the greenness around it. These scattered blossoms map his wandering way, and endear to us, in spite of ourselves, the most wayward soul that ever carried a minstrel's harp across the world.

Shelley had great deficiencies. His imagination was not of a human order, and had little perception of the wealth of noble sentiment and passion which may dwell in human-kind. In this respect his vision was most limited. He recognized little more in human nature than a certain savage capacity for rebellion, and a wild passion of love-love which could be manifested but in one way-and does not seem to have had any eye for individual character, or the subtleties of personal difference. His two great qualities even are by no means necessarily human. The grand type of the one-Prometheus-is a demi-god; and the utterly unrestrained luxuriance of the other seems better adapted for something either above or below humanity-the irresponsible Ariel or the equally irresponsible four-footed creatures of the woods and wilds-than for men and women. He has not left behind him one single conception of human character which it is worth the world's while to preserve; neither can we find amid his poems any real attempt to fathom the mysteries of nature, or put meaning into her darkness. He has one wild panacea for every thing, and a vague yet incendiary creed by which to make the impossible actual; but his mind lacks even the conditions which make insight possible, his power of sympathy being restricted by the same incapacity which limits his understanding.. Men are an inarticulate dull wonder to him..