n of a development by its highest form, though that
form may have been produced but once, and produced imperfectly. Now the
highest product of the Metaphysical School was Crashaw, and Crashaw was a
Shelley _manque_; he never reached the Promised Land, but he had fervid
visions of it. The Metaphysical School, like Shelley, loved imagery for
its own sake: and how beautiful a thing the frank toying with imagery may
be, let _The Skylark_ and _The Cloud_ witness. It is only evil when the
poet, on the straight way to a fixed object, lags continually from the
path to play. This is commendable neither in poet nor errand-boy. The
Metaphysical School failed, not because it toyed with imagery, but
because it toyed with it frostily. To sport with the tangles of Neaera's
hair may be trivial idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly as your
relation to Neaera is that of heartless gallantry or of love. So you may
toy with imagery in mere intellectual ingenuity, and then you might as
well go write acrostics: or you may toy with it in raptures, and then you
may write a _Sensitive Plant_. In fact, the Metaphysical poets when they
went astray cannot be said to have done anything so dainty as is implied
by _toying_ with imagery. They cut it into shapes with a pair of
scissors. From all such danger Shelley was saved by his passionate
spontaneity. No trappings are too splendid for the swift steeds of
sunrise. His sword-hilt may be rough with jewels, but it is the hilt of
an Excalibur. His thoughts scorch through all the folds of expression.
His cloth of gold bursts at the flexures, and shows the naked poetry.

* * * * *

It is this gift of not merely embodying but apprehending everything in
figure which co-operates towards creating his rarest characteristics, so
almost preternaturally developed in no other poet, namely, his well-known
power to condense the most hydrogenic abstraction. Science can now educe
threads of such exquisite tenuity that only the feet of the tiniest
infant-spiders can ascend them; but up the filmiest insubstantiality
Shelley runs with agile ease. To him, in truth, nothing is abstract. The
dustiest abstractions

Start, and tremble under his feet,
And blossom in purple and red.

The coldest moon of an idea rises haloed through his vaporous
imagination. The dimmest-sparked chip of a conception blazes and
scintillates in the subtile oxygen of his mind. The most wrinkled AEson
of an abstruseness