ith a subtler beauty, more divinely dyed in pathos, than any
in English literature of its rare kind, or of any kind out of
Shakespeare,--a poem in which all the inward harvests of a tender,
deep, capacious, loving, and religious life, all the heaped hoards of
feeling and imagination in a life most visionary and most real, are
gathered into one sheaf of poetic affluence, to dazzle and subdue with
excess of light,--or gathered rather into a bundle of sheaves, stanza
rising on stanza, each like a flame fresh shooting from a hidden bed
of Nature's most precious perfumes, each shedding a new and
a richer fragrance; I mean the "Adonais" of Shelley. For this
glittering masterpiece,--a congenial commentary on which would have
illuminated the literary atmosphere of England,--Mr. Carlyle had no
word; no word for Shelley, no word for Coleridge, no word for
Wordsworth. For Keats he had a word in the paper on Burns, and here it
is: "Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole
consists in a weak-eyed, maudlin sensibility and a certain vague,
random timefulness of nature, is no separate faculty." A parenthesis,
short and contemptuous, is all he gives to one of whom it has been
truly said, that of no poet who has lived, not of Shakespeare, is the
poetry written before the twenty-fifth year so good as his; and of
whom it may as truly be said, that his best poems need no apology in
the youthfulness of their author; but that for originality, power,
variety, feeling, thoughtfulness, melody, they take rank in the first
class of the poetry of the world. Is not Thomas Carlyle justly
chargeable with having committed a high literary misdemeanor? Nay,
considering his gift of poetic insight, and with it his persistent
ignoring of the great English poets of his age, considering the warm
solicitation on the one side, and the duty on the other, his
offense may be termed a literary crime. He knew better.

Mr. Carlyle somewhere contrasts his age with that of Elizabeth, after
this fashion; "For Raleighs and Shakespeares we have Beau Brummell and
Sheridan Knowles." Only on the surmise that Mr. Carlyle owed poor
Knowles some desperate grudge, can such an outburst be accounted for.
Otherwise it is sheer fatuity, or an impotent explosion of literary
spite. For the breadth and brilliancy of the poetic day shed upon it,
no period in the history of any nation, not that of Pericles or of
Elizabeth, is more resplendent than that which had not