y only in two
other cases, both infelicitous--"glode" for "glided," and "blosmy" for
"blossomy." He did not, like Keats, look on fine phrases with the eye of
a lover. His taste was the conventional taste of the time. Thus he said
of Byron's 'Cain', "It is apocalyptic, it is a revelation not before
communicated to man"; and he thought Byron and Tom Moore better poets
than himself. As regards art, he cheapened Michael Angelo, and the only
things about which he was enthusiastic in Italy, except the fragments of
antiquity which he loved for their associations, were the paintings of
Raphael and Guido Reni. Nor do we find in him any of those new metrical
effects, those sublime inventions in prosody, with which the great
masters astonish us. Blank verse is a test of poets in this respect, and
Shelley's blank verse is limp and characterless. Those triumphs, again,
which consist in the beauty of complicated wholes, were never his. He is
supreme, indeed, in simple outbursts where there is no question of form,
but in efforts of longer breath, where architecture is required, he too
often sprawls and fumbles before the inspiration comes.

Yet his verse has merits which seem to make such criticisms vain. We
may trace in it all kinds of 'arrieres pensees', philosophical and
sociological, that an artist ought not to have, and we may even dislike
its dominating conception of a vague spirit that pervades the universe;
but we must admit that when he wrote it was as if seized and swept away
by some "unseen power" that fell upon him unpremeditated. His emotions
were of that fatal violence which distinguishes so many illustrious but
unhappy souls from the mass of peaceable mankind. In the early part
of last century a set of illustrations to Faust by Retzch used to be
greatly admired; about one of them, a picture of Faust and Margaret in
the arbour, Shelley says in a letter to a friend: "The artist makes one
envy his happiness that he can sketch such things with calmness, which
I only dared look upon once, and which made my brain swim round only
to touch the leaf on the opposite side of which I knew that it was
figured." So slight were the occasions that could affect him even to
vertigo. When, from whatever cause, the frenzy took him, he would write
hastily, leaving gaps, not caring about the sense. Afterwards he would
work conscientiously over what he had written, but there was nothing
left for him to do but to correct in cold blood, make pla