ly on the lips of the young.' It is in
your lyrics that you live, and I do not mean that every one could pass
an examination in the plot of "Prometheus Unbound" Talking of this
piece, by the way, a Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in you a
hankering after life in a cave--doubtless an unconsciously inherited
memory from cave-man. Speaking of cave-man reminds me that you once
spoke of deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of the
moral, intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we
now agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave.

Fortunately you gave us 'Adonai, and 'Hellas' instead of this treatise,
and we have now successfully written the natural history of Man for
ourselves. Science tells us that before becoming cave-dweller he was
a brute; Experience daily proclaims that he constantly reverts to his
original condition. _L'homme est un mechant animal_, in spite of
your boyish efforts to add pretty girls 'to the list of the good, the
disinterested, and the free.'

Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics,
were 'the haunts meet for thee.' Watching the yellow bees in the ivy
bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the
sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and
fleeting things into a tissue where light and music were at one, that
was the task of Shelley! 'To ask you for anything human,' you said, 'was
like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop.' Nay, rather, like asking
Apollo and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia,
and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer;
you spread before us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we turn
away, with a sneer, because, out of all the multitudes of singers,
one is spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled? One, like
Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes, when he looks
on the common works of common men, are, like the eyes of Anchises, blind
with excess of light. Let Shelley sing of what he saw, what none saw but
Shelley!

Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems (the most romantic of
things didactic), our world is no better than the world you knew. This
will disappoint you, who had 'a passion for reforming it.' Kings and
priests are very much where you left them. True, we have a poet who
assails them, at large, frequently and fearlessly; yet Mr. Swinburne has
neve