It was at length the same to me,
Fettered or fetterless to be;

I learned to love despair.

And thus, when they appeared at last,
And all my bonds aside were cast,
These heavy walls to me had grown
A hermitage—and all my own!
And half I felt as they were come
To tear me from a sacred home.
With spiders I had friendship made
And watched them in their sullen trade;
Had seen the mice by moonlight play-
And why should I feel less than they?
We were all inmates of one place,
And I, the monarch of each race,
Had power to kill; yet, strange to tell!
In quiet we had learned to dwell.
My very chains and I grew friends,
So much a long communion tends
To make us what we are: even I
Regained my freedom with a sigh.

395

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-378. A hermitage, etc. Compare Lovelace's famous lines

"Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an heritage."

375

380

385

390

XXVI.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

1792-1822.

PH Shelley

CHARACTERIZATION BY SYMONDS.1

1. As a poet Shelley contributed a new quality to English literature a quality of ideality, freedom, and spiritual audacity, which severe critics of other nations think we lack. Byron's dar

From Shelley, by John Addington Symonds, in Morley's English Men of Letters.

ing is in a different region; his elemental worldliness and pungent satire do not liberate our energies or cheer us with new hopes and splendid vistas. Wordsworth, the very antithesis to Shelley in his reverent accord with institutions, suits our meditative mood, sustains us with a sound philosophy, and braces us by healthy contact with Nature he so dearly loved. But in Wordsworth there is none of Shelley's magnetism. What remains of permanent value in Coleridge's poetry-such works as Christabel, the Ancient Mariner, or Kubla Khan-is a product of pure artistic fancy, tempered by the author's mysticism. Keats, true and sacred poet as he was, loved Nature with a somewhat sensuous devotion. She was for him a mistress rather than a Diotima; nor did he share the prophetic fire which burns in Shelley's verse, quite apart from the enunciation of his favorite tenets.

2. In none of Shelley's greatest contemporaries was the lyrical faculty so paramount; and whether we consider his minor songs, his odes, or his more complicated choral dramas, we acknowledge that he was the loftiest and the most spontaneous singer of our language. In range of power he was also conspicuous above the rest. Not only did he write the best lyrics, but the best tragedy, the best translations, and the best familiar poems of his century. As a satirist and humorist I cannot place him so high as some of his admirers do; and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate at intervals into poor rhetoric.

3. While his genius was so varied and its flight so unapproached in swiftness, it would be vain to deny that Shelley, as an artist, had faults from which the men with whom I have compared him were more free. The most prominent of these are haste, incoherence, verbal carelessness, incompleteness, a want of narrative force, and a weak hold on objective realities. Even his warmest admirers, if they are sincere critics, will concede that his verse, taken altogether, is marked by inequality. In his eager self-abandonment to inspiration he produced much that is unsatisfying simply because it is not ripe. There is no defect of power in him, but a defect of patience; and the final word to be pronounced in estimating the larger bulk of his poetry is the word immature. 4. Not only was the poet young, but the fruit of his young

mind had been plucked before it had been duly mellowed by reflection. Again, he did not care enough for common things to present them with artistic fulness. He was intolerant of detail, and thus failed to model with the roundness that we find in Goethe's work. He flew at the grand, the spacious, the sublime; and did not always succeed in realizing for his readers what he had imagined. A certain want of faith in his own powers, fostered by the extraordinary discouragement under which he had to write, prevented him from finishing what he began, or from giving that ultimate form of perfection to his longer works which we admire in shorter pieces, like the Ode to the West Wind. When a poem was ready, he had it hastily printed, and passed on to fresh creative efforts. If anything occurred to interrupt his energy, he flung the sketch aside.

5. Some of these defects, if we may use the word at all to indicate our sense that Shelley might by care have been made equal to his highest self, were in a great measure the correlative of his chief quality-the ideality of which I have already spoken. He composed with all his faculties—mental, emotional, and physical-at the utmost strain, at a white heat of intense fervor, striving to attain one object, the truest and most passionate investiture for the thoughts which had inflamed his over-quick imagination. The result is that his finest work has more the stamp of something natural and elemental-the wind, the sea, the depth of air-than of a more artistic product. Plato would have said "the Muses filled this man with sacred madness," and, when he wrote, he was no longer in his own control.

6. There was, moreover, ever present in his nature an effort, an aspiration after a better than the best this world can show, which prompted him to blend the choicest products of his thought and fancy with the fairest images borrowed from the earth on which he lived. He never willingly composed except under the impulse to body forth a vision of the love and light and life which was the spirit of the power he worshipped. This persistent upward striving, this earnestness, this passionate intensity, this piety of soul and purity of inspiration, give a quite unique spirituality to his poems. But it cannot be expected that the colder perfections of the Academic art should be always found in them. They have something of the waywardness and negligence of nature,

something of the asymmetreia we admire in the earlier creations of Greek architecture. That Shelley, acute critic and profound student as he was, could conform himself to rule and show himself an artist in the stricter sense is, however, abundantly proved by The Cenci and by Adonais. The reason why he did not always observe this method will be understood by those who have studied his Defence of Poetry, and learned to sympathize with his impassioned theory of art.

7. If a final word were needed to utter the unutterable sense of waste excited in us by Shelley's premature absorption into the mystery of the unknown, we might find it in the last lines of his own Alastor:

And all the shows o' the world are frail and vain
To weep a loss that turns their light to shade.
It is a woe "too deep for tears" when all
Is reft at once, when some surpassing spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind nor sobs nor groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;
But pale despair and cold tranquillity,
Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.

I. ODE TO A SKYLARK.

[INTRODUCTION.-The Ode to a Skylark, the most popular of all Shelley's lyrics, was produced in 1820, when the poet was in his twenty-ninth year-two years before his death. "It is," says Prof. De Mille, "penetrated through and through with the spirit of the beautiful, and has more of high and pure poetic rapture than any other ode in existence."]

I.

Hail to thee, blithe spirit,

Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-What are the principal characteristics of this lyric? Ans. They are delicacy of imagery and exquisite melody of language.

1-5. What kind of sentence, grammatically considered, is the first stanza? -Point out any epithets of special beauty in this stanza.-Explain the expression "unpremeditated art."