God. I do not think that Shelley's genius, trained as it was, could have taken any other path of development. He received in his earliest days the severest shock of repulsion from the world as it was. His whole nature led him to the elaboration of ideal beauties. There was something of his own "Sensitive Plant" in his mind, which made him start away from repulsive qualities, and rendered him incapable of reconciling contradictions, or holding together with a strong hand the various elements of a complex problem. Into one side of human perfection he had a far higher insight than most men of his day, -the passive nobility of beautiful instinct and endurance. But the very idealising tendency which repelled him from human politics, repelled him also from all human creeds, and the very first objection he took to them was to their demand of deference for a spiritual King. From all arbitrary authority he recoiled, and never apparently conceived the possibility of authority properly so called, and yet not arbitrary. Hence, to save his faith in human nature, he was almost compelled to seat a shadow on the throne of the Universe. The only marvel is, that his imagination still kept a throne of the Universe at all, even for a shadow. His ideal world was one "where music and moonlight and feeling are one," and in such a world apparently no throne or sceptre would be needed. The result of his idealism, as of all such idealism, was, that he nowhere found any true rest for his spirit, since he never came upon any free and immutable will on which to lean. The sense of weakness, of a longing to lean somewhere, without recognising any strength on which to lean, runs through his whole poems :

:

"Yet now despair itself is mild

Even as the winds and waters are ;
I could lie down like a tired child,

And weep away the life of care

Which I have borne, and yet must bear,"

is a burden that reappears habitually in his poetry. There is but one passage in all Shelley's exquisite poetry which rises into pure sublimity,-because power is of the essence of sublimity, and Shelley had no true sense of power. But one does, and that is, characteristically enough, the passage in which he puts into Beatrice Cenci's heart the sudden doubt lest the spiritual world be without God after all:— "Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be

No God, no Heaven, no Earth, in the void world,-
The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!”

A sublimer line was scarcely ever written. It casts just a gleam on the infinite horror of an empty eternity, and then drops the veil again, leaving the infinitude of weakness and emptiness intensified into a sublimity. Yet here is the true root of Shelley's restlessness-the suspicion that when desire fails, the object of the heart's desire may fail with it,—that "the One" who "remains" is a thinner, fainter, less living thing than the "many" which "change and pass," -that there is nothing substantial at the heart of the universe, no Will behind the fleeting beauty, no strength of self-sacrifice behind the melting love. Shelley was no Atheist. His Pantheism was sincere, and at times no doubt a kind of faith to him; but belief in a universal essence gave no solidity to the order of the world, no firm law to the flux and reflux of human desire, had no power to accept the

command, "Be still, and know that I am God." Behind this "form and flush of the universal beauty there always lay a dreadful phantom of possible emptiness. He felt of Pantheistic hopes as he felt of the pictured falsehoods on the surface of the individual mind, that they might be all illusory scenic effects. "Lift not the painted veil which those who live call life." What if we were to find even behind the fresco of universal loveliness nothing but a "wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world "?

IV

MR. BROWNING 1

MR. BROWNING, though commanding a wider intellectual sweep of view than almost any artist of our day, is hardly as yet a poet of European celebrity, though he is the prime favourite of an intellectual sect. This arises not from any sectarian tendency in his poetry,—nothing could be more catholic,—but from the general absence of that atmosphere of fascination about his verse, that melody of mind and speech, which is the main attraction of poetry to ordinary men, and but for which, imaginative power, however great, would scarcely arrest their attention at all. Coleridge once defined poetry-very badly I conceive as "that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part." Now Coleridge certainly did not intend to exclude Mr. Browning's works by anticipation from all claim to the title of

1 The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. 3 vols. Third edition. Chapman & Hall. The Ring and the Book. 4 vols. Smith & Elder, 1869.

poems; if he had lived to read Mr. Browning, Coleridge's profound, rich, and catholic imagination would scarcely have failed to appreciate fully the power and insight of the younger poet; but no definition of a poem could have been contrived more ingeniously calculated to exclude Mr. Browning's works from that class of composition. Most of Mr. Browning's poems might be described precisely "as proposing for their immediate object truth, not pleasure, and as aiming at such a satisfaction from the whole as is by no means compatible with any very distinct gratification from each component part." In other words, Mr. Browning's poems, though, when clearly apprehended, they seldom fail to give that higher kind of imaginative satisfaction which is one of the most enviable intellectual states, give a very moderate amount of immediate sensitive pleasure. There is little of the thrill through the brain, of the vibrating melodious sweetness, of the tranquillising harmony, of the atmosphere of loveliness, which one usually associates with the highest powers of poetical expression. And then, as to the relation of the whole to the part, which is Coleridge's second test of a poem, Mr. Browning's poems are not so organised that the parts give you any high gratification till you catch a view of his whole.

Coleridge says, that "the reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the solution, but by the pleasurable activity of the mind, excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power, or like the path of sound through the air, at every step he (the poet) pauses and half recedes, and from