orldliness and pungent satire do not liberate our
energies, or cheer us with new hopes and splendid vistas. Wordsworth,
the very antithesis to Shelley in his reverent accord with institutions,
suits our meditative mood, sustains us with a sound philosophy, and
braces us by healthy contact with the Nature he so dearly loved. But in
Wordsworth there is none of Shelley's magnetism. $What remains of
permanent value in Coleridge's poetry--such work as "Christabel", the
"Ancient Mariner", or "Kubla Khan"--is a product of pure artistic fancy,
tempered by the author's mysticism. Keats, true and sacred poet as he
was, loved Nature with a somewhat sensuous devotion. She was for him a
mistress rather than a Diotima; nor did he share the prophetic fire
which burns in Shelley's verse, quite apart from the direct enunciation
of his favourite tenets. In none of Shelley's greatest contemporaries
was the lyrical faculty so paramount; and whether we consider his minor
songs, his odes, or his more complicated choral dramas, we acknowledge
that he was the loftiest and the most spontaneous singer of our
language. In range of power he was also conspicuous above the rest. Not
only did he write the best lyrics, but the best tragedy, the best
translations, and the best familiar poems of his century. As a satirist
and humourist, I cannot place him so high as some of his admirers do;
and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts
forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its
myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate at intervals into poor rhetoric.

While his genius was so varied and its flight so unapproached in
swiftness, it would be vain to deny that Shelley, as an artist, had
faults from which the men with whom I have compared him were more free.
The most prominent of these are haste, incoherence, verbal carelessness,
incompleteness, a want of narrative force, and a weak hold on objective
realities. Even his warmest admirers, if they are sincere critics, will
concede that his verse, taken altogether, is marked by inequality. In
his eager self-abandonment to inspiration, he produced much that is
unsatisfying simply because it is not ripe. There was no defect of power
in him, but a defect of patience; and the final word to be pronounced in
estimating the larger bulk of his poetry is the word immature. Not only
was the poet young; but the fruit of his young mind had been plucked
before it had been duly m