Shelley; an essay | Page 8

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 laurelwood. 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