The minstrel's theme indeed seldom is cheerful; but the melody always is enchanting; and in that quality the specimens I have offered are very far from monopolizing the charms of their class. Many others are their equals. Some, which are too long to be set out at all fully, as well as too familiarly known to need recalling, are their superiors. I may instance the succession, almost dizzy, of glowing, glorious images dedicated to the Skylark. The whole is a golden staircase up which the song winds, step by step, heavenwards.10 From the wings of its sister The Cloud, itself nursling of the sky': Are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun.11 Gloom characterizes the weird challenge-incantation he calls it-to the wild West Wind, 'dirge of the dying year.' 12 Arethusa, not foreseeing the rough wooing preparing for her by the river-god Alpheus, is, on the contrary, as joyous : Gliding and springing She went, ever singing, The Earth seemed to love her, As for the poet himself, I do not suppose that he would even have understood the bestowal of praise for form and symmetry. In the apparent play of rhythm he was no more striving consciously to attract by the grace of superficial harmony than in the lamentation for Adonais,14 the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,15 or the grandly intolerant Ode to Liberty 16 Search him through and through for depth, for essence, of thought; you will find nothing to VOL. II I beat the biting irony of the boast of Ozymandias; and where among his words for music is melody more sufficing than in that perfect sonnet? I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone Simply his impulse, the current of his spirit, happened to use the same channel as common human feeling. He desired to express an emotion or conception; and by chance it was definite enough not to need to stretch and strain his native instinct of ear. The coincidence was a happy one for the outside world. That must not flatter itself that the fanatic of ideas meant to sacrifice the least of them to its pleasure. From first to last he was constantly self-centred, whether meditating flaws in the Universe, or a cloud in its airy nest; in a song, 'When the lamp is shattered,' as much as in one to the Skylark; in both as in the stark agony of the Cenci; in the lilting of the Hymn of Pan as in that to Intellectual Beautynot the less profound that it is as lovely also as music by the night-wind sent Thro' strings of some still instrument, He has painted pictures we can see with our eyes shut; of the Pisan pine forest, where the multitudinous Billows murmur at our feet, and of the Euganean Hills, in 19 the noon of autumn's glow, While he gazed and composed, he was dwelling still as apart in his own fancy, as when lost in the labyrinthine enigmas of Prometheus Unbound. Lovers of poetry who would know of what highest rapture the Muse has the secret, must be content to accept Shelley for that he is. They must not mind that he sings for himself, not to them. On the other hand, they cannot be inhibited from hearing him, though they have not bought the privilege by studying Julian and Maddalo, with its madman's reverie, or a single line of Epipsychidion. At least Gentiles are free to follow the glow of the lamps which devotees keep burning at the shrine. Standing outside the sanctuary they can listen to lyrics which will vibrate for them as directly from the soul of Shelley-gathered to the Kings of thought—as, for his worshippers, rolls forth the full diapason of pieces like The Revolt of Islam and The Witch of Atlas, hurled against the world as it exists, and its government. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Harry Buxton Forman. Four vols. Reeves and Turner, 1876. 14 Adonais (Elegy on the Death of John Keats), vol. iii, pp. 9–29. 15 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, vol. i, pp. 371-5. 16 Ode to Liberty, vol. ii, pp. 305-15. 17 Ozymandias, vol. i, p. 376. 18 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, st. 3, vol. i, p. 373. 19 To Jane, Invitation to the Pine Forest, vv. 65–7, vol. iv, p. 135. 20 Lines, Written among the Euganean Hills, vv. 286–93, vol. i, p. 368. JOHN KEATS 1795-1821 ENDYMION surprised and shocked the lingering orthodoxy of late Georgian critics. Its author provoked as much animosity as Wordsworth, and more than Byron. Wordsworth bore no relation to the idols of their youth, Dryden and Pope. Byron, and Scott also, affected to revere both. Shelley reviewers simply did not understand. Endymion was the worst of rebels. It had borrowed and travestied myths of the Greek Classics, and the metre of English Masters. Many real faults indeed may be found in it. The plot wanders, and perpetually loses itself. The narrative, often the descriptions, are prolix and tedious. The diction is troubled with strange words and phrases. The rhyme tends to lead the sense. Not rarely the ideas are thin in comparison with the parade of the circumstances meant to wait upon them. Occasionally the prosaic will obtrude itself; cotton-backing showing under rich velvet pile. But then the golden autumnal haze, the delicious uncertainty what visions of romance will next come and go from and into happy Dreamland! The age was one of muddy perturbation-strifes of peoples against kings, and kings against peoples, of mortal struggles between agrarianism and feudalism, labour and capital, political economy and an outworn Faith. Imagine, for the few non-combatants, the joy in this pageant of Olympian goddesses haunting the happy pastures of Arcadian hills! It is in truth an Elizabethan poet's world. The Elizabethan idea of poetry breathes throughout. Laws of |