words of unmeant bitterness". This dark principle of evil,
we may suppose, after dwelling in the poet's mind, in an abstract form,
crept into this broken poem, where it lies coiled up among
the choicest and most fragrant flowers, and occasionally springs
its warning rattle, and projects its forked tongue, to assure us of
its ugly presence.

Both these great poems show the influence of the revival of
the old English Ballads. Coleridge had drunk deep of their spirit.

Shelley and Byron were fully charged with the revolutionary spirit
of the time. Shelley, of all the poets of his generation,
had the most prophetic fervor in regard to the progress of
the democratic spirit. All his greatest poems are informed
with this fervor, but it is especially exhibited in
the `Prometheus Unbound', which is, in the words of Todhunter,
"to all other lyrical poems what the ninth symphony is to all
other symphonies; and more than this, for Shelley has here
outsoared himself more unquestionably than Beethoven in his last
great orchestral work. . . . The Titan Prometheus is the incarnation
of the genius of humanity, chained and suffering under the tyranny
of the evil principle which at present rules over the world,
typified in Jupiter; the name Prometheus, FORESIGHT, connecting him
with that poetic imagination which is the true prophetic power,
penetrating the mystery of things, because, as Shelley implies,
it is a kind of divine Logos incarnate in man--a creative force
which dominates nature by acting in harmony with her."

It is, perhaps, more correct to say of Byron, that he was charged
with the spirit of revolt rather than with the revolutionary spirit.
The revolutionary spirit was in him indefinite, inarticulate;
he offered nothing to put in the place of the social and political
evils against which he rebelled. There is nothing CONSTRUCTIVE
in his poetry. But if his great passion-capital, his keen
spiritual susceptibility, and his great power of vigorous expression,
had been brought into the service of constructive thought,
he might have been a restorative power in his generation.

The greatest loss which English poetry ever sustained,
was in the premature death of John Keats. What he would have done
had his life been spared, we have an assurance in what he has left us.
He was spiritually constituted to be one of the subtlest interpreters
of the secrets of life that the whole range of English poetry exhibits.
No poet ever