ne", we cannot even guess. The poem, as
we have it, breaks abruptly with these words: "Then what is Life? I
cried"--a sentence of the profoundest import, when we remember that the
questioner was now about to seek its answer in the halls of Death.

To separate any single passage from a poem which owes so much of its
splendour to the continuity of music and the succession of visionary
images, does it cruel wrong. Yet this must be attempted; for Shelley is
the only English poet who has successfully handled that most difficult
of metres, terza rima. His power over complicated versification cannot
be appreciated except by duly noticing the method he employed in
treating a structure alien, perhaps, to the genius of our literature,
and even in Italian used with perfect mastery by none but Dante. To
select the introduction and part of the first paragraph will inflict
less violence upon the "Triumph of Life" as a whole, than to detach one
of its episodes.

Swift as a spirit hastening to his task
Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask

Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth.
The smokeless altars of the mountain snows
Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth

Of light, the Ocean's orison arose,
To which the birds tempered their matin lay.
All flowers in field or forest which unclose

Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day,
Swinging their censers in the element,
With orient incense lit by the new ray,

Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent
Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air;
And, in succession due, did continent,

Isle, ocean, and all things that in them wear
The form and character of mortal mould,
Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear

Their portion of the toil, which he of old
Took as his own, and then imposed on them.
But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold

Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem
The cone of night, now they were laid asleep,
Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem

Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep
Of a green Apennine. Before me fled
The night; behind me rose the day; the deep

Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head,--
When a strange trance over my fancy grew
Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread

Was so transparent that the scene came through
As clear as, wh