his flight, and allow him access to that upper sky where the skylark pours her full heart.

The composition of "Prometheus" is nothing if not musical. The transition from scene to scene seems feeble and artificial as long as you have not realised that the scenes are bound by an inner link, as the various phases of one musical thought. Shelley is musical even to the technicalities of style. The Earth, speaking of Prometheus, says,

"Our refuge, our defence lies fallen and vanquishèd."

The poet wants to emphasise the impression as a musician might do, by a sustained chord, and he has the last words," fallen and vanquishèd," successively repeated by two personified echoes which have no other purpose.

Again, in the first scene, Prometheus desires the Mountains, Springs and Winds to repeat the curse which he once uttered against Jupiter. They say in substance, "We could repeat it, but dare not." But they express it, anthem-like, twice over, each of them in turn first leaving in suspense the end of the

response.

Shelley turns verse into music by the rapid indivisible flight of his lines, by his elusive charm, by the total fusion of sound and sense, by his divine madness, and above all by the gift of expressing pure emotion, or rather the soul itself in its motion. I know only one poet by whom this approximation of poetry to music has been carried even farther-Swinburne, on whom I happen to have just published a big book.*

L'Oeuvre de Swinburne' (Oxford University Press).

As it was not Swinburne's centenary, and I had not to be so strict with him as with Shelley, I may seem to have overrated him. Let me therefore here declare that if Swinburne is the more complete musician, Shelley is the purer musician as he is the purer soul; Shelley generally refrains from descriptive or imitative music, which is after all a sort of painting. Swinburne is a virtuoso whose wings are sometimes weighed down by too much matter-I mean too much sound. He is the seamew, skimming the salt wave; Shelley, the skylark, lost in the ether.

I have, perhaps, sufficiently defined his poetical temperament-musical, soaring, ardent.

Let us now see to what subjects this fiery genius was applied. Since Matthew Arnold deplored "the incurable want in his poetry of a sound subject matter," it may be worth stating that his first and main subject was simply the divine, the absolute, the infinite-God, although he does not use that name.

He calls it "Spirit of beauty, the One, the Unborn and Undying"; more often, like his master Plato, he calls it "Love." He pursues it under an allegorical form in "Alastor," adores it in " Adonais," and, "under the radiant veil of a woman," in "Epipsychidion," which must decidedly be reckoned as a poem of sacred rather than profane love.

It is the same spirit which he looks for in humanity, the second of his great themes. Now, humanity with him does not mean individual men and women, nor, as with Pope or Voltaire, the collection of all human beings. It is already the one great Being whom we shall find in the religion of Auguste Comte, or, with differences, in Swinburne's "Hymn of Man."

Of this conception Shelley is the creator, and I believe the fact has not been noticed before:

"Man, oh not men! a chain of linked thought,

Of love and might to be divided not

Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is its own divine control."

These lines are from "Prometheus Unbound,” where Shelley, as a thinker, appears at his greatest. May I be allowed to say that this grand philosophical poem has been rather misunderstood by Shelley's chief biographer, Professor Dowden. "Humanity," says Dowden, "is no chained Titan of indomitable virtue. It is a weak and trembling thing which yet through error and weakness, traversed and overcome, may at last grow strong. To represent evil as external, the tyranny of a malignant God, is to falsify the true conception of human progress.

Under the sentimental, semi-puritanical tone dear to the age when these lines were written you will detect two mistakes. Shelley does not represent evil as external. For gods are the creation of man; they are oppressive fictions. Prometheus, or the human mind, gave omnipotence not exactly to brute force, but to force untempered by love—

"Gave wisdom which is strength to Jupiter."

And no more than Shelley represents evil as external does he say, as implied by Dowden, that salvation is by revolution only. For when is Prometheus unbound? Not when he invents the arts and sciences, not when he curses Jupiter; but when

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he retracts his curse, when, renouncing hatred, he wishes

"No living thing to suffer pain."

Not by revolution, therefore but by an inner conversion to love, in the old Christian way which some Christians fail to recognise, are Prometheus and the whole world with him regenerated.

The third object of Shelley's poetry is Nature.

A new philosophical influence, that of Spinoza, here counterbalances that of Plato. It enhances the value of the visible world, whereas Plato rather induced Shelley mentally to shatter into pieces that "dome of many-coloured glass" that "stains the white radiance of eternity." But Shelley (did Goethe help him to it?) takes one step further than Spinoza : for him the soul or substance of the Universe is motion, life, activity, desire. Few poets have had a like feeling of the Universal, of the world as a whole and a like gift of forgetting themselves in that whole. This is the difference between him and Wordsworth -of course his predecessor as a modern interpreter of Nature. Wordsworth sees in Nature only those attributes of calm and permanence that make himself comfortable. His interested optimism is too much contradicted by modern science to carry conviction to us. Shelley, on the contrary, sees very clearly the two sides of Nature, permanence and change or destruction. His Mont Blanc, for instance, is

"Still, snowy and serene,"

but is also to him, as to the modern geologist, a huge mass of ruin. Flowers, in "The Sensitive

Plant," have their bloom and their decay. Nature, in "Prometheus," is subject to evil as much as man. Wordsworth never forgets himself, but Shelley becomes the Sensitive Plant or the Skylark, or the West Wind; he is the cloud who says "I change, but I cannot die ; he is the Earth whirling through space, or the moon spinning with amorous rapture round the earth.

Do you know anything like this grand passage from the fourth act of "Prometheus"? Have you met elsewhere such cosmic intoxication? or, outside of Beethoven, such a hymn to joy? Can it not be said that the soul of the poet for a moment really inhabits the axis of this whirling universe?

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Now he who could so lose himself in the vastest and vaguest objects could also penetrate with as much sympathy as Wordsworth, and with more exquisite refinement, the frailest and most delicate. He knew that miraculous ubiquity of his soul. “I am formed," he wrote to Godwin, to consider the moral or material universe as a whole and to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling." He who could grasp the world in its unity could also divine the infinite complexity of organic life. He could find a world in the eyes of Asia

"Orb within orb and line through line inwoven "

-or in the green heaven formed by tangled stems of flowers, which he explored, so to speak, down to their cellular recesses. He is the great master of the poetry of plant-life. Not the skylark only, but perhaps even more the Sensitive Plant is an accurate symbol of our poet.