ey in
particular is typically poetical. It is poetry divinely inspired; and
Shelley himself is perhaps no more ineffectual or more lacking in
humour than an angel properly should be. Nor is his greatness all a
matter of aesthetic abstraction and wild music. It is a fact of
capital importance in the development of human genius that the great
revolution in Christendom against Christianity, a revolution that
began with the Renaissance and is not yet completed, should have found
angels to herald it, no less than that other revolution did which
began at Bethlehem; and that among these new angels there should have
been one so winsome, pure, and rapturous as Shelley. How shall we
reconcile these conflicting impressions? Shall we force ourselves to
call the genius of Shelley second rate because it was revolutionary,
and shall we attribute all enthusiasm for him to literary affectation
or political prejudice? Or shall we rather abandon the orthodox
principle that an important subject-matter and a sane spirit are
essential to great works? Or shall we look for a different issue out
of our perplexity, by asking if the analysis and comprehension are not
perhaps at fault which declare that these things are not present in
Shelley's poetry? This last is the direction in which I conceive the
truth to lie. A little consideration will show us that Shelley really
has a great subject-matter--what ought to be; and that he has a real
humanity--though it is humanity in the seed, humanity in its internal
principle, rather than in those deformed expressions of it which can
flourish in the world.

Shelley seems hardly to have been brought up; he grew up in the
nursery among his young sisters, at school among the rude boys,
without any affectionate guidance, without imbibing any religious or
social tradition. If he received any formal training or correction, he
instantly rejected it inwardly, set it down as unjust and absurd, and
turned instead to sailing paper boats, to reading romances or to
writing them, or to watching with delight the magic of chemical
experiments. Thus the mind of Shelley was thoroughly disinherited; but
not, like the minds of most revolutionists, by accident and through
the niggardliness of fortune, for few revolutionists would be such if
they were heirs to a baronetcy. Shelley's mind disinherited itself out
of allegiance to itself, because it was too sensitive and too highly
endowed for the world into which it had descende