the same rank, the man with whose
soul and circumstance they have to deal is the [Greek: politikon zoon],
no high abstraction of the race, but the creature with concrete
relations and a full objective life. In Shakespeare the dramatic form
helps partly to make this more prominent, though the poet's spirit
shines forth thus, independently of the mould which it imposes on
itself. Of Milton we may say, too, that, in spite of the supernatural
machinery of his greatest poem, it bears strongly impressed on it the
political mark, and that in those minor pieces, where he is avowedly in
the political sphere, he still rises to the full height of his majestic
harmony and noblest dignity.

Byron was touched by the same fire. The contemporary and friend of the
most truly spiritual of all English poets, Shelley, he was himself among
the most essentially political. Or perhaps one will be better
understood, describing his quality as a quality of poetical
_worldliness_, in its enlarged and generous sense of energetic interest
in real transactions, and a capacity of being moved and raised by them
into those lofty moods of emotion which in more spiritual natures are
only kindled by contemplation of the vast infinitudes that compass the
human soul round about. That Shelley was immeasurably superior to Byron
in all the rarer qualities of the specially poetic mind appears to us so
unmistakably assured a fact, that difference of opinion upon it can only
spring from a more fundamental difference of opinion as to what it is
that constitutes this specially poetic quality. If more than anything
else it consists in the power of transfiguring action, character, and
thought, in the serene radiance of the purest imaginative intelligence,
and the gift of expressing these transformed products in the finest
articulate vibrations of emotional speech, then must we not confess that
Byron has composed no piece which from this point may compare with
_Prometheus_ or the _Cenci_, any more than Rubens may take his place
with Raphael? We feel that Shelley transports the spirit to the highest
bound and limit of the intelligible; and that with him thought passes
through one superadded and more rarefying process than the other poet is
master of. If it be true, as has been written, that 'Poetry is the
breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' we may say that Shelley
teaches us to apprehend that further something, the breath and finer
spirit of poetry itself. Contr