s, of rejoicings
(such as does ultimately end the drama where Prometheus appears on the
scene) would have been legitimate enough. Instead, however, the
bewildered reader finds the drama unfolding itself through scene after
scene which leaves the action precisely where it found it, because there
is no longer an action to advance. It is as if the choral _finale_ of an
opera were prolonged through two acts.

We have, nevertheless, called _Prometheus_ Shelley's greatest poem
because it is the most comprehensive storehouse of his power. Were we
asked to name the most _perfect_ among his longer efforts, we should name
the poem in which he lamented Keats: under the shed petals of his lovely
fancy giving the slain bird a silken burial. Seldom is the death of a
poet mourned in true poetry. Not often is the singer coffined in laurel-
wood. Among the very few exceptions to such a rule, the greatest is
_Adonais_. In the English language only _Lycidas_ competes with it; and
when we prefer _Adonais_ to _Lycidas_, we are following the precedent set
in the case of Cicero: _Adonais_ is the longer. As regards command over
abstraction, it is no less characteristically Shelleian than
_Prometheus_. It is throughout a series of abstractions vitalised with
daring exquisiteness, from Morning who sought:

Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,

and who

Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day,

to the Dreams that were the flock of the dead shepherd, the Dreams

Whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed; and whom he taught
The love that was its music;

of whom one sees, as she hangs mourning over him,

Upon the silken fringe of his faint eyes,
Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies
A tear some dream has loosened from his brain!
Lost angel of a ruined Paradise!
She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain
She faded like a cloud which hath outwept its rain.

In the solar spectrum, beyond the extreme red and extreme violet rays,
are whole series of colours, demonstrable, but imperceptible to gross
human vision. Such writing as this we have quoted renders visible the
invisibilities of imaginative colour.

One thing prevents _Adonais_ from being ideally perfect: its lack of
Christian hope. Yet we remember well the writer of a popular memoir on
Keats proposing as "the best consolation for the mind pained by this sad