oubles our peace. It passes over the sterility of our poor comfort
like a lost child's cry. It beats upon the door. It rattles the shut
casement. It sobs with the rain upon the roof. This is partly because
Shelley, more than any poet, has entered into the loneliness of the
elements, and given up his heart to the wind, and his soul to the
outer darkness. The other poets can _describe_ these things, but he
_becomes_ what they are. Listening to him, we listen to them. And
who can bear to listen to them? Who, in cold blood, can receive the
sorrows of the "many waters"? Who can endure while the heavens,
that are "themselves so old," bend down with the burden of their
secret?

Not to "describe," but to share the life, or the death-in-life, of the
thing you write of, that is the true poetic way. The "arrowy odours"
of those first white violets he makes us feel, darting forth from
among the dead leaves, do they leave us content with the art of their
description? They provoke us with their fine essence. They trouble
us with a fatality we have to share. The passing from its "caverns of
rain" of the newborn cloud--we do not only follow it, obedient to the
spell of rhetoric; we are whirled forward with it, laughing at its
"cenotaph" and our own, into unimagined aerial spaces. One feels all
this and more under Shelley's influence--but alas! as soon as one has
felt it, the old cynical, realistic mood descends again, "heavy as
frost," and the vision of ourselves, poor, straggling, forked animals,
caught up into such regions, shows but as a pantomimic farce; and
we awake, shamed and clothed, and in our "right mind!"

With some poets, with Milton and Matthew Arnold, for example,
there is always a kind of implicit sub-reference, accompanying the
heroic gesture or the magical touch, to our poor normal humanity.
With others, with Tennyson or Browning, for instance, one is often
rather absurdly aware of the worthy Victorian Person, behind the
poetic mask, "singing" his ethical ditty--like a great, self-conscious
speckled thrush upon a prominent bough.

But with Shelley everything is forgotten. It is the authentic fury, the
divine madness; and we pass out of ourselves, and "suffer a
sea-change into something rich and strange." Into something "strange,"
perhaps, rather than something "rich"; for the temperament of
Shelley, like that of Corot, leads him to suppress the more glowing
threads of Nature's woof; leads him to dissolve everything