s anything but a child; lies back in his skiff, and looks at the clouds.
He plays truant from earth, slips through the wicket of fancy into
heaven's meadow, and goes gathering stars. Here we have that absolute
virgin-gold of song which is the scarcest among human products, and for
which we can go to but three poets--Coleridge, Shelley, Chopin, {8} and
perhaps we should add Keats. _Christabel_ and _Kubla-Khan_; _The
Skylark_, _The Cloud_, and _The Sensitive Plant_ (in its first two
parts). _The Eve of Saint Agnes_ and _The Nightingale_; certain of the
Nocturnes;--these things make very quintessentialised loveliness. It is
attar of poetry.

Remark, as a thing worth remarking, that, although Shelley's diction is
at other times singularly rich, it ceases in these poems to be rich, or
to obtrude itself at all; it is imperceptible; his Muse has become a
veritable Echo, whose body has dissolved from about her voice. Indeed,
when his diction is richest, nevertheless the poetry so dominates the
expression that we feel the latter only as an atmosphere until we are
satiated with the former; then we discover with surprise to how imperial
a vesture we had been blinded by gazing on the face of his song. A
lesson, this, deserving to be conned by a generation so opposite in
tendency as our own: a lesson that in poetry, as in the Kingdom of God,
we should not take thought too greatly wherewith we shall be clothed, but
seek first {9} the spirit, and all these things will be added unto us.

On the marvellous music of Shelley's verse we need not dwell, except to
note that he avoids that metronomic beat of rhythm which Edgar Poe
introduced into modern lyric measures, as Pope introduced it into the
rhyming heroics of his day. Our varied metres are becoming as painfully
over-polished as Pope's one metre. Shelley could at need sacrifice
smoothness to fitness. He could write an anapaest that would send Mr.
Swinburne into strong shudders (e.g., "stream did glide") when he
instinctively felt that by so forgoing the more obvious music of melody
he would better secure the higher music of harmony. If we have to add
that in other ways he was far from escaping the defects of his merits,
and would sometimes have to acknowledge that his Nilotic flood too often
overflowed its banks, what is this but saying that he died young?

* * * * *

It may be thought that in our casual comments on Shelley's life we have
been blind to its evil side. Tha