rence on the ground of judgment, but one
which tends more and more to efface itself in the sphere of the higher
creative imagination. Mr. Browning might as briefly, and I think more
fully, have expressed the salient quality of his poet, even while he
could describe it in these emphatic words:

'I pass at once, therefore, from Shelley's minor excellencies to his
noblest and predominating characteristic.

'This I call his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the
absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from
his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous
films for the connexion of each with each, than have been thrown by any
modern artificer of whom I have knowledge . . . I would rather consider
Shelley's poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment
of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the
spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal than . . .'

This essay has, in common with the poems of the preceding years, the
one quality of a largely religious and, in a certain sense, Christian
spirit, and in this respect it falls naturally into the general series
of its author's works. The assertion of Platonic ideas suggests,
however, a mood of spiritual thought for which the reference in
'Pauline' has been our only, and a scarcely sufficient preparation; nor
could the most definite theism to be extracted from Platonic beliefs
ever satisfy the human aspirations which, in a nature like that of
Robert Browning, culminate in the idea of God. The metaphysical aspect
of the poet's genius here distinctly reappears for the first time since
'Sordello', and also for the last. It becomes merged in the simpler
forms of the religious imagination.

The justification of the man Shelley, to which great part of the Essay
is devoted, contains little that would seem new to his more recent
apologists; little also which to the writer's later judgments continued
to recommend itself as true. It was as a great poetic artist, not as a
great poet, that the author of 'Prometheus' and 'The Cenci', of 'Julian
and Maddalo', and 'Epipsychidion' was finally to rank in Mr. Browning's
mind. The whole remains nevertheless a memorial of a very touching
affection; and whatever intrinsic value the Essay may possess, its main
interest must always be biographical. Its motive and inspiration are set
forth in the closing lines:

'It is because I have long held these opinio