it consumed all that could perish of this noble being. It is affirmed that the heart of Shelley - by some marvellous fortuity remained undestroyed amid his ashes. That gentle heart which love and suffering had already made pure enough for immortality the devouring element forbore to harm!

They buried his ashes at Rome in that cemetery where Keats is laid, and which Shelley himself has thus described: "An open space among the ruins of ancient Rome, covered in winter with violets and daisies, it might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." And there he is made one with Nature, and has won from her sweet grace the boon to become a

"Portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely."

A poet possessing a more genuine poetic impulse and inspiration than Shelley has not sung in England since the time of Shakespeare. If to his vital heat, his fusing, shaping power of imagination, had been superadded a profounder insight, a calmer temperament, and a broader, truer philosophy, Shelley's song might have been such as mortal never sang before; for he had indeed

"... Bathed in the Thespian springs,

And had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had."

And moreover, he was by divine election a seer, - the poet of the hereafter, "the herald of the golden year," the prophet of universal religious freedom and universal human brotherhood! In him culminated the great tendencies of our time, - its democracy, its socialism, its scepticism, and its pantheism. Impelled by mental gravitation to the most daring heights of speculation, like the bird of Jove, he "soared too high, too boldly gazed;" and

the light that might have warmed and fructified, blinded and seared.

However deplorable was Shelley's scepticism, his life is affirmed to have been one of singular purity, elevation, and martyr-like devotion to principle; and surely honest unbelief is less condemnable than dead, unfruitful faith. The pitying angels only know which sight was saddest before high Heaven, Shelley in his desolate unbelief, rudderless and unpiloted, and drifting mournfully away from the "infinite haven of our souls;" or Coleridge, securely lapped in Lethean dreams, and mouthing prayers with drugged lips, devoutly subscribing to the "Thirty-Nine Articles," while roundly denying God and truth by a selfish and unsanctified life! Shelley died at twenty-nine. Ten years was the brief time allotted him to sing on earth; and though his vernal time was rife with immortal bloom, he was not permitted to bring his full ripe sheaf into the eternal garner of song.

His "Queen Mab," written at eighteen, is crude and defective, and unworthy to be classed with the productions of his riper years; yet it has been considered as the richest promise ever given at so early an age, of high poetic power. In sentiment, the poem outrages every institution and ordinance of God or man; and so insanely atheistic a production has perhaps never been born among poets. Though bringing a heavy weight of obloquy and censure upon Shelley, "Queen Mab" has done but little harm to Christianity. One takes always into consideration the frame of mind in which it was written; for no impartial reader could consider it the sane production of a healthful intellect, yet, as some one observes, "as in the ravings of a maniac there is much that is clear and sweet, with much that is but mere gibberish and incoherence, so it is with this singular poem."

"Alastor, or, The Spirit of Solitude," was the next production of the poet. In "Alastor" Shelley draws from his own experience, and its descriptive passages are excelled in none of his previous works. From the date of "Alastor" to his death was not quite seven years. In this brief Maytime of song, "The Revolt of Islam," the dramas of Prometheus Unbound," "The Cenci," and Hellas," "The Tale of Rosalind and Helen," "The Masque of Anarchy," "The Sensitive Plant," "Julian and Maddalo," "The Witch of Atlas," "Epipsychidion," "Adonais," "The Triumph of Life," his translations and shorter poems were produced. "So much poetry," observes a careful critic, "so rich in various beauty, was never poured forth with so rapid a flow from any other mind."

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Shelley, with all his abundance and facility, was a fastidious writer, and accustomed to elaborate to the utmost whatever he wrote. It has been justly said that "all that can be properly called unripeness in his composition had ceased with the Revolt of Islam.' That haziness of thought and uncertainty of expression which may be found in almost all his subsequent works is not to be confounded with rawness; it is but the dreamy ecstasy, too high for speech, in which his subtle, sensitive, and poetically voluptuous nature delighted to dissolve and lose itself."

Shelley's most predominant characteristic is ideality. As has been happily observed, —

Thought, with him, is in fact the reality, while outward things are but its shadow; hence the remote, abstract character of his poetry, and its lack of reality and tangibility.

"He was at once pure and impassioned, sensuous and spiritual; from form, color, and sound he could draw a keener and more intense enjoyment than the gross, animal sensations of more earthy natures."

Add to all this that in his "heart of hearts" he hungered after absolute ideal perfection with an intenseness that only a poet, freighted with "golden immortalities of being," may know. No poet more sincerely reverenced his art. "Poetry," he says in one of his essays, "is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds;" and again, "Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man."

The abstract, mystic idealism of Shelley's poetry will always render it less widely popular than it deserves to be. To the realist he is sometimes fearfully obscure. His imagery is often accumulated, and he has an incorrigible tendency to become purely metaphysical when he should be purely poetical. His imagination is rich and fertile, and his diction singularly classical and imposing in sound and structure. "The Revolt of Islam" is a poem of great beauty and of great faults. The description of the river-voyage at the end of the poem is among the most finished of Shelley's productions.

"Prometheus Unbound" a sequel to the "Prometheus Bound" of the Greek-is a remarkable poem. Here the poet and his subject are in perfect harmony. A remarkable feature in the poem is that constant personification of inanimate objects which is a striking characteristic of Shelley's style. This fine description of the flight of the Hours, makes a picture vivid as Titian himself could have painted.

"Behold!

The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night
I see cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds,
Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink

With eager lips the wind of their own speed,

As if the thing they loved fled on before,

And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks
Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all

Sweep onward.

These are the immortal hours,

Of whom thou didst demand. One waits for thee."

"The Cenci," a tragedy, was published in 1819. In a dedication to Leigh Hunt the author remarks,

"Those writings which I have hitherto published have been little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to be or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality."

As an effort of intellectual strength "The Cenci" is incomparably the best of Shelley's productions; as a tragedy it is one of the best of modern times. In selecting for his plot the revolting story of the Cenci, the poet has been accused of a ghoul-like appetite for the horrible and shocking. Against this unfounded assertion De Quincey thus happily protests:

"The true motive of the selection of such a story was, not its darkness, but the light which fights with the darkness. Shelley found the whole attraction of this dreadful tale in the angelic nature of Beatrice, as revealed in the portrait of her by Guido. The fine relief; the light upon a background of darkness, giving the artistic effect; the touching beauty of Beatrice; her remorse in the midst of real innocence; her weakness, and her inexpressible affliction; and even the murder, which is but the embodiment of her noble aspirations after deliverance, throwing into fuller revelation the glory of the suffering face, were alike the dream of the painter and the poet, and both have made them immortal."