^«^1 
 
■ 
 
STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 BY 
 
 STOPFORD A. BROOKE 
 
 (Y'tUY.-Z^ ) 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 Of 
 
 New York : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 London : DUCKWORTH £sf CO. 
 
 1907 
 

 m£m 
 
 All rights reser'ved 
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE i 
 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT 55 
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 1 1 5 
 THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY . . . .144 
 
 EPIPSYCHIDION 176 
 
 KEATS ....... 202 
 
OF TH£ 
 
 UNtVERSlTY 
 
 OF 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 William Blake was born November 28, 1757, in 
 Broad Street, Carnaby Market, London. His father 
 was a respectable hosier, and would have brought up 
 the boy to his own business. But Art had laid on 
 him her overmastering hand, and he was her faith- 
 ful servant all his life long. His art, as painter and 
 engraver, would be a worthy subject, but it is not 
 mine. What his lyrical poetry was as literature, 
 and its relation to the general movement of poetry 
 in England, is the subject of this essay. 
 
 He became a mystic, a poet, a designer in colour 
 and in black and white, and he considered himself 
 to be something of a prophet. He was a prophet 
 as a poet is a prophet. He touched matters which 
 lay on the outskirts of the realm of pure poetry — 
 political, social, and religious — but he touched them 
 with a poet's passion. He belongs to those poets who, 
 before the outbreak of the Revolution in France in 
 1789, set forward in verse some of the revolutionary 
 ideas. Neither class, caste, nor privilege existed for 
 Blake. Kings and the aristocrats who supported 
 the class of kings represented by Louis xiv., Blake 
 denounced as villains. He had an equal abhorrence 
 
2 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 for the priests, who used their power and their craft 
 to hamper the natural life and the souls of men, and 
 for the kind of religion they taught. His passion for 
 human liberty was intense, even to extremes. His 
 instinct of the oneness of mankind in the Eternal's 
 eyes was equally intense. Gray had not long been 
 dead when this phenomenon arose ; yet I do not 
 suppose a wider gulf on these matters could be 
 than that which separated Blake from Gray. One 
 would say a century divided the Songs of Innocence 
 from the Elegy ^ even though a faint breath of the 
 
 I revolution- views of man sighs through the Elegy. 
 Blake then represents, in part of his work, the new 
 spirit of the Revolution which was coming on the 
 earth, and of course into poetry. At this point he 
 stands alongside of Cowper and Burns, but much 
 more resolutely, much more consciously, much 
 more sternly than they, is he of the Revolution. 
 
 In other ways, more immediately connected with 
 the history of poetry in England, he was also a 
 forerunner ; striking into the light and air high up 
 on the mount Parnassus new fountains of song 
 which were in the future to become rivers of fresh 
 emotion, thought, and imagination. It is always 
 fascinating to stand at the birthplace of a great 
 stream and think of the splendour, use, and comfort 
 it has been to the children of men ; and the streams 
 of fresh song which Blake smote from the rock 
 have, like one of the noble rivers, brought joy, 
 festivity, awakening, and novelty to the imagination 
 and the soul of man. 
 
S^r^^€J~tSb.eLL.^jnUe^ide, 
 
 C>fh>p/v?YJ . i.f^roohe 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
/ 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE / 3 
 
 His earliest work preceded the work of Cowper 
 and Burns. The Poetical Sketches were written and 
 finished by 1777. But they were not published till 
 1783. His Songs of Innocence were set forth in 
 lyS^yhis Songs of Experience in 1794. Even the last, 
 then, preceded the first volume of Wordsworth's 
 Lyrical Ballads by four years. The new elements he 
 brought into poetry were taken up by Wordsworth 
 and thrown for the first time into clear definiti^ 
 and challengeable form in the Lyrical Ballads. 
 Wordsworth did not take them from Blake. They 
 arose spontaneously in his soul. They were in the 
 air. Nor did Wordsworth represent all the new 
 aspects of thought and emotion Blake created in 
 the world of song. The political, religious, and 
 mystic elements of Blake's poetry were felt by 
 other poets than Wordsworth, and put into clearer 
 form than Blake gave to them. But Blake sketched 
 them all, he began the picture which others finished. 
 He^is like_one born out of due time. 
 
 At the age of twelve he began to write verse, 
 and he continued to amuse his leisure with it till 
 he was twenty years old. He threw these poems 
 together in 1777, and at Flaxman's instance pub- 
 lished them in 1783 in a volume entitled Poetical 
 Sketches. It is a little collection, and it was lost on 
 its production. But small as it is, it is full of 
 curious interest — a landmark so distinct that it 
 arrests the historian of poetry. It was partly 
 original, as I have already said, and on its original 
 elements I shall afterwards dwell. On the other 
 
4 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 hand, it is partly imitative, for no poet can alto- 
 gether escape from the past; but its imitation was 
 not of the poetry that preceded it, but of that 
 of the Elizabethans. In that imitation it was some- 
 what at one with Blake's immediate predecessors. 
 Gray, ColUns, Warton, and the rest of them had 
 initiated a reversion towards the Elizabethan poets, 
 a vivid interest in Shakespeare, and a direct imita- 
 tion of Spenser. These new interests had been grow- 
 ing for some time, and Blake shared in them. They 
 accorded with his nature, which itself belonged to 
 the childhood of the world. The work of Gray 
 in these matters was transition work. It did not 
 strike deep into the future ; and it is marked by 
 the trained skill, the determined artifice, and the 
 careful composition of the Augustan poets. Blake, 
 on the other hand, did no transition work of this 
 kind at all. He went straight back in this book, and 
 at a single leap, for his models, to the Elizabethans. 
 He ignored the whole of the critical and artificial 
 school. His language is the language of a wild and 
 uncultivated country ; his verse is rough, unobedient 
 to metrical laws. What excellence there is, is 
 attained by dint of Nature, not of Art. It is a 
 boy who is writing, with a boy's ignorance and 
 carelessness of rules of art, with also a boy's daring 
 originality. He adds to his imitative work con- 
 stituents which did not belong to the Elizabethans. 
 Its air is different from that which Spenser and 
 Shakespeare breathed. . I^ draws in to - k some --43f 
 the^glenaents^of theLJktlJrg^ Tt belongs,^ ex£rLin its 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 5 
 
 i mitations of the Elizabethans, to t he nineteenth 
 century, not to the eighteenth. This is its speci al 
 
 One of the poems in the Sketches is an imitation 
 of Spenser. Others of his time had also done this, 
 but Blake did it with an individuality which not 
 only modernised the Elizabethan way of thinking 
 and feeling, but also changed in every stanza the 
 Spenserian metre. Two are ballads, and ballads 
 were a fashion of the day, set on foot by the pub- 
 lication of the Percy Ballads. But those that were 
 written now were sentimental, graceful compositions, 
 like Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina, Blake's 
 ballads clash out rude, untamed, and bloodstained 
 verses ; their note is that of the most super- 
 natural and savage of the Border Ballads. Gray 
 would have read them with dismay, and turned 
 from them with contempt. Indeed, they are not 
 good, but still they were quite different from what 
 had gone before them ; and the something different 
 in them went on, to become, in other hands, a new 
 power in song. 
 
 A freshly awakened interest in the Elizabethan 
 drama belongs also to this time when Blake was 
 young. But it was chiefly a critical interest. No 
 one cared to write in the manner of these dra- 
 matists ; no one could. But Blake did. He took 
 up the lyre which had fallen from Marlowe's hands 
 in the dramatic fragment of Edward IIL^ but the 
 sound of it was broken and inharmonious in com- 
 parison with the sonorous music of Marlowe. Shake- 
 
6 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 speare was almost too quiet for Blake's redundant 
 youth. Then also, he took up the shepherd pipe 
 to which the greater Elizabethans sang their songs. 
 A song like My silks and fine array might have been 
 fathered by Fletcher. 
 
 What charmed him in these ancients was their 
 naturalism. What displeased him in his contempo- 
 raries was their artificialism. Collins, though he 
 strove for simplicity and loved it, though he arrived 
 at som.e natural joy, could not altogether shake ojfF 
 the atmosphere of his time. In Gray there was too 
 much self-contemplation, too much self-conscious 
 art, too much traditional convention, to allow natural 
 impulse, natural passion, to have its full freedom. 
 Blake never breathed that artificial atmosphere. He 
 lived when it brooded, still heavily, on poetry, but 
 he lived above its close and breezeless elements. 
 He was conscious of them, but would have nothing 
 to do with them. ^ Let others,' he said, ^sit in council 
 with their modern peers. 
 
 And judge of tinkling rhymes and elegances terse, 
 
 I will not.' And he might well say that, for the 
 transition poetry which followed on Gray and 
 Collins had now sunk into the miserable twangling 
 of Hayley's Triumphs of Temper, Now and again 
 a little musical cry like a child's laugh arose in some 
 neglected ballad, but, on the whole, the Muses had 
 fallen asleep in England. And Blake could find 
 them nowhere. His poem, in 1777, entitled To the 
 Muses expresses, not only his dismay at the decay of 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 7 
 
 poetry in England, but cries out for the restoration 
 to poetry of the childlike passion which, among the 
 ancient poets of England, sprang to lovely life, 
 fresh as a fountain from the hills. 
 
 Whether on Ida's shady brow, 
 
 Or in the chambers of the East, 
 The chambers of the Sun, that now 
 
 From antient melody have ceas'd : 
 
 Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair, 
 Or the green corners of the Earth, 
 
 Or the blue regions of the air 
 
 Where the melodious winds have birth ; 
 
 Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove, 
 
 Beneath the bosom of the sea, 
 Wand' ring in many a coral grove, 
 
 Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry 1 
 
 How have you left the antient love 
 
 That bards of old enjoy'd in you ! 
 The languid strings do scarcely move ! 
 
 The sound is forc'd, the notes are few ! 
 
 There is no languor, no forced or conventional 
 phrasing in the verses of this early book. And the 
 notes he strikes are manifold and various. Notes 
 of loveliness, simplicity, and passion, even of fine 
 melody, for, though the metre of these poems is 
 in the strangest confusion, it has a sweetness of 
 its own, a musical wash as of the wind through 
 woods of pine ; and before long, as his original 
 nature forced him, he made his own manner of 
 verse and his own metres. The manner and 
 music of the fragment of Edward III. had not been 
 
8 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 heard in England since the Restoration. Its verse 
 is sensational, but it does not think of itself. The 
 imagination is at work in it like a savage of genius ; 
 but, at last, it is truly at work. No one, since 
 Milton laid down his harp, would have written these 
 lines on England as the sovereign of the seas : 
 
 Our right, that Heaven gave 
 To England, when at the birth of nature 
 She was seated in the deep ; the Ocean ceas'd 
 Her mighty roar, and, fawning play'd around 
 Her snowy feet, and own'd his awful Queen. 
 
 Still nobler, almost like Milton, and inconceivably 
 different from anything else written at the time, is 
 this little speech of Chandos : 
 
 Considerate age, my Lord, views motives. 
 
 And not acts ; when neither warbling voice 
 
 Nor trilling pipe is heard, nor pleasure sits 
 
 With trembling age, the voice of Conscience then. 
 
 Sweeter than music in a summer's eve. 
 
 Shall warble round the snowy head, and keep 
 
 Sweet symphony to feather'd angels, sitting 
 
 As guardians round your chair ; then shall the pulse 
 
 Beat slow, and taste and touch and sound and smell. 
 
 That sing and dance round Reason's fine-wrought throne. 
 
 Shall flee away, and leave them all forlorn ; 
 
 Yet not forlorn if Conscience is his friend. 
 
 This imagination, in contact here with human 
 life, is even more fresh and vivid in its work on 
 Nature. The four poems addressed to ^he Seasons 
 retain that impersonation in which Spenser delighted, 
 but they are nearer to such impersonation as Keats 
 used in his Ode to Autumn than they are to Spenser. 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 9 
 
 They have the modern rather than the ancient 
 literary touch. Moreover, they hold in them what 
 Spenser's do not hold — the personal love of Nature 
 which is the special mark of the poetry of the nine- 
 teenth century. In Blake that love of Nature for 
 her own sake takes the form of joy ; an audacious 
 joy as of a young man in the plenitude of his 
 power in the secret strength and godlike splendour 
 of Nature. Here is part of Summer : 
 
 O thou who passest thro' our vallies in 
 
 Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat 
 
 That flames from their large nostrils ! Thou, O Summer, 
 
 Oft pitched' St here thy golden tent, and oft 
 
 Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld 
 
 With joy thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair. 
 
 And here, as a contrast, as soft, as full of humanity 
 as that I have quoted is strong and full of early 
 godhead, are the Lines to the Evening Star : their 
 metre halts, but it is a boy who is writing. 
 
 Thou fair-haired angel of the evening, 
 
 Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light 
 
 Thy bright torch of love ; thy radiant crown 
 
 Put on, and smile upon our evening bed ! 
 
 Smile on our loves ; and, while thou drawest the 
 
 Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew 
 
 On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes 
 
 In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on 
 
 The lake ; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes. 
 
 And wash the dusk with silver. 
 
 The little poem l^o Mornings if Shelley could 
 have repaired the metre Into his own melody, would 
 be like one of those lyrics of his which embody the 
 
>!ii^'^ 
 ""^■C^^^. 
 
 10 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 nature-myths of the early world. The poem goes 
 back to such lines as these of Shakespeare : 
 
 Look where the dawn, in russet mantle clad, 
 Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill ; 
 
 and it looks forward to Shelley. It is not too long 
 to quote. 
 
 O holy virgin ! clad in purest white, 
 Unlock heavn's golden gates, and issue forth ; 
 Awake the dawn that sleeps in heaven ; let light 
 Rise from the chambers of the east, and bring 
 The honied dew that cometh on waking day. 
 O radiant morning, salute the sun 
 Rouz'd like a huntsman to the chace, and with 
 Thy buskin'd feet appear upon our hills. 
 
 These, spite of their metrical mistakes, are even 
 more modern than Wordsworth, as modern as 
 Keats and Tennyson ; they are prophetic of a time 
 at hand when Nature should impress herself on the 
 poets as a woman on her lover, and bring to 
 life a new, impassioned music. * The sounding 
 cataract,' said Wordsworth, 'haunted me like a 
 passion.' 
 
 Later on, in the prophetic books, he is some- 
 times, when his mysticism does not intrude, closer 
 to reality. His eye, for the morrient, is fixed on 
 the subject. He draws direct from Nature. No- 
 thing then seems to intrude into her sphere. All 
 the world is alive. The lark sings the song of the 
 morning to God. The sun listens, full of awe and 
 humility. The whole world rejoices in itself and 
 in its Maker. Here are lines which it is almost 
 
 p 
 
 I tin: 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE ii 
 
 incredible were written in the eighteenth century. 
 They are even nearer than anything in Wordsworth 
 or Shelley to the spiritual Being of Nature — to 
 that universal Thought and Love of which visible 
 Nature is the form : 
 
 Thou hearest the nightingale begin the song of spring ; 
 The lark, sitting upon his earthy bed, just as the morn 
 Appears, listens silent ; then, springing from the waving corn- 
 field, loud 
 He leads the choir of day : trill — trill — trill — trill — 
 Mounting upon the wings of light into the great expanse. 
 Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining heavenly shell 
 His little throat labours with inspiration : every feather 
 On throat and breast and wing vibrate with the effluence divine. 
 All Nature listens to him silent : and the awful sun 
 Stands still upon the mountains, looking on this little bird 
 With eyes of soft humility, and wonder, love, and awe. 
 Then loud, from their green coverts, all the birds began their 
 
 song,— 
 The thrush, the linnet and the goldfinch, robin and the wren, 
 Awake the sun from his sweet reverie upon the mountains ; 
 The nightingale again essays his song, and through the day 
 And through the night warbles luxuriant ; every bird of song 
 Attending his loud harmony with admiration and with love. 
 
 That is beautiful, and it is only one example of 
 nature poetry in the prophetic books. It touches 
 Milton with *one hand, it touches Wordsworth 
 and Shelley with another. 
 
 Again, the cry of natural, uncovenanted passion 
 of love in poetry, of which there are scarcely a 
 dozen instances to be found for nearly a hundred 
 years, but which, a few years later, was recovered 
 by Burns in all its fulness, is now struck in 1777 
 
12 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 by Blake. And struck in a new manner, a 
 manner all his own ; touched not only with natural 
 sensuousness, but with a fire of divine purity, as of 
 one who had seen in her he loved a vision of the 
 heavenly host. The difference of this little poem 
 from the love poetry of his time is incalculable. 
 
 Like as an angel glitt'ring in the sky- 
 In times of innocence and holy joy ; 
 The joyful shepherd stops his grateful song 
 To hear the music of an angeFs tongue. 
 
 So when she speaks, the voice of Heaven I hear ; 
 So when we walk, nothing impure comes near ; 
 Each field seems Eden, and each calm retreat ; 
 Each village seems the haunt of holy feet. 
 
 But that sweet village where my black-ey'd maid 
 Closes her eyes in sleep beneath night's shade, 
 Whene'er I enter, more than mortal fire 
 Burns in my soul, and doth my song inspire. 
 
 But the greatest change in poetry, and difference 
 from the poets of his time, is in the songs. These 
 are truly the first sounding of the modern lyric, of 
 its natural delight and sorrow. They look forward 
 then, but they also look backward. A few of 
 them, in this book, reproduce, in grace and music 
 and natural feeling, the spirit of Elizabethan song. 
 In the Songs of Innocence they cease to be imitative; 
 they leave the Elizabethan songsters behind, and 
 are now all Blake's own, original in manner, music, 
 metre, and spirit. 
 
 To write a lovely song is one of the rare things 
 of the world. Sometimes a man, when life is thrill- 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 13 
 
 ing with youthfulness, and when in an hour of 
 uncommon and clear feeling all is lost but the high 
 emotion of the moment, will write a single song, 
 and write no more. There are instances of this in 
 poetry, but they are very uncommon. But to have 
 the power to write many songs, or even half a dozen 
 of a beautiful quality, belongs only to Nature's 
 darlings. 
 
 A perfect song needs genius, passion, and the 
 power of giving a lovely movement to the verse — 
 things that are the gift of nature — and with these, 
 the power of seeing what is lovely in the joyfulness 
 or the sorrow either of nature or humanity. It 
 needs the fearlessness which belongs to unself-con- 
 sciousness. It needs the naturalness of a child. 
 When these are in a man, then any momentary, 
 piercing, passionate impression received from human 
 life and nature — such an impression as naturally fits 
 itself into brevity of expression — is seized on with 
 eagerness, and around every impression all the 
 powers of the soul fly together, adding each its own 
 light, and heat, and variety, till the imagination, 
 rejoicing in the result and glowing with it, first 
 strikes it into a passionate unity and then shapes 
 it into words that sing by their own nature and 
 are enchanted with their own singing. But this 
 impression, fitted to be shaped into a song rather 
 than into any other kind of poetry, does not come 
 forth slowly as an epic or a drama, but rises 
 instantly, like the rising of a water-lily to the 
 surface of a pool. As to its music, it has one 
 
14 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 cry above all its various sounds, the cry of the 
 dominant unmeditated emotion which gives it 
 unity. Then what we feel, and what the song ought 
 to make us feel, is that we are in the presence of 
 a birth of Nature herself, as lovely, swift, happy, 
 and unconscious as the sudden unfolding of the 
 water-lily's flower. 
 
 Again, the best songs are written not only 
 when the poet is young, but when the nation round 
 him is also young, when humanity wears the beauty 
 and joy of promise. When Shakespeare began his 
 work England had been born again. The people 
 were as bold, natural, and excited as a boy let loose 
 from school. Life was, as it were, a succession of 
 songs. It had the suddenness, the spontaneousness, 
 the want of self-consciousness, the freshness, of a 
 song. 
 
 Well, Blake, rising himself, as it were, out of the 
 deep, having no communion with the critical or 
 reflective poetry, abandoning himself frankly to 
 every natural feeling, having genius and its powers, 
 quite devoid of self-consideration, seeing beauty 
 everywhere, hearing music everywhere, ineff^ably 
 eager and joyous, a very child yet with a man's 
 power — made songs in his heart all day long, and 
 when any one of them leaped in his heart for joy, 
 it rose instantly, like the lily released from the lake- 
 bed, into the flower of unchartered verse. 
 
 Moreover, though his world was old around him, 
 a new world was at hand. That was coming, after 
 a pregnancy of centuries, that impulsive outburst 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 15 
 
 into form of ideas filled each to the brim and 
 overflowing with emotion, which for a short time 
 made the world like the world of Shakespeare's 
 youth, 
 
 Fresh as a banner bright, unfurled 
 To music suddenly. 
 
 Blake felt that impulse of the Revolution even 
 before it came, as Wordsworth and Coleridge felt 
 it when it came. It is interesting to think that 
 the date of the publication of the Songs of Innocence 
 was 1789. 
 
 It was no wonder then that he wrote songs. 
 Moreover, there were elements in his character 
 which were the air and fire and dew of songs. He 
 lived in a visionary world of his own in which all 
 things rejoiced and sang. ' Heaven opens here,' 
 he says of Felpham where he lived in a cottage, ' on 
 all sides her golden gates ; her windows are not 
 obstructed by vapours ; voices of the celestial in- 
 habitants are more distinctly heard and their forms 
 more distinctly seen ; and my cottage is also a shadow 
 of their houses.' He saw once small and lovely spirits 
 singing in every blossom of the neighbouring cherry 
 tree. This world, gloomy with money-making, 
 did not trouble him. All about him the heavens 
 were filled with the morning stars, chanting the 
 praise of God. Therefore, though the age in which 
 he lived was outworn, his world was even more 
 dewy and young than England was to Shakespeare. 
 No marvel, then, that he was a natural lyrist, that 
 
i6 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 he could write lines like these, in which the emotion 
 and the metrical movement alike are like the eyes 
 and the dancing of a musical child. 
 
 There she sits and feeds her young, 
 Sweet I hear her mournful song; 
 And thy lovely leaves among 
 There is Love, I hear his tongue. 
 
 Nor is it any marvel that he could write, with the 
 same power as he touched the sunlight of life, a song 
 like My silks and fine array ^ in which he pencilled in 
 the deep shadow of life with the quaintness and 
 tenderness of a child. It is imitative ; its phrases 
 seem borrowed from Shakespeare ; and were one to 
 find it in a play of Fletcher's we should not be 
 surprised ; but it has its own music — Blake's silver 
 note, not as yet fully conscious of itself, nor as 
 yet shaped into its individual melody. It differs 
 jfrom Fletcher's singing as one star differs from 
 another. 
 
 My silks and fine array, 
 
 My smiles and languished air, 
 By love are driv'n away ; 
 
 And mournful lean Despair 
 Brings me yew to deck my grave : 
 Such end true lovers have. 
 
 His face is fair as heav'n 
 
 When springing buds unfold ; 
 O why to him was 't giv'n 
 
 Whose heart is wintry cold ? 
 His breast is love's all-worship'd tomb, 
 Where all love's pilgrims come. 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 17 
 
 Bring me an axe and spade, 
 
 Bring me a winding sheet ; 
 When I my grave have made 
 
 Let winds and tempests beat : 
 Then down I '11 lie as cold as clay. 
 True love doth pass away ! 
 
 It is more childlike than Fletcher. It imitates 
 Elizabethan verse as a child imitates its parent. 
 Indeed, the best explanation of Blake's songs is that 
 he was always a child at heart ; and it would not 
 have mattered where he lived, he would always 
 have been at home. The child, if he be loved, 
 knows neither time nor space. Were he placed 
 suddenly in the Egypt of the Pharaohs, or on 
 the steps of the Parthenon when Phidias was 
 working, he would play, were those he loved with 
 him, with as much unconsciousness and joy as in 
 his own garden in Surrey. All his life long 
 Blake was like that. Wherever he wished to be he* 
 was. Wherever he wished to live he lived. All 
 lovely things were as real to him as fairyland is to 
 the child. All things were of the same time and 
 the same place to him whenever he chose. Not 
 one thought of distrust and fear and shame ever 
 drew him back from spontaneous joy. This was 
 and is, and will be always, the atmosphere in which 
 a certain rare type of the Song is born — the Song 
 unconscious of self or sorrow, full of innocent 
 delight in an innocent world, of happy trust in 
 love. 
 
 There are songs of many passions, of sorrow, of 
 
i8 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 earthly rapture, of mirth, of the fine spirit of youth 
 and age, of natural love, of patriot fervour, of the 
 beauty of the world in our soul — of a hundred 
 things-^but the song of the child's heart has never 
 been written by a child. It is only sung within. 
 To write it needed a man with the heart of a child ; 
 and to find him is one of the rarest things in the 
 world. We have been driven out of Eden, where 
 we could lie down with the lion and the bear, and 
 hear the angels speak. The swords wave always 
 over the gate and forbid return ; and though we 
 remember the music of the song our childhood 
 sang in our soul, we cannot put it into words. But 
 Blake was never unable to return. Whenever he 
 liked he played in Eden, and its songs came freshly 
 to his lips. This leaves him at this point alone 
 among the poets. There are a few who, like Shake- 
 speare, can go forth with Adam and Eve over 
 the world, share in the deep passions of our mortal 
 struggle, then verse them with immortal pity, and 
 afterwards pass back for a moment through the 
 gate, and sing a song of the fearless paradise. 
 Only a very few have done it, and the power to 
 do it was momentary. But Blake lived at choice, 
 and at his ease, within the flashing circle of the 
 swords. No angel sentinel ever challenged him. 
 His Songs of Innocence uncover the hidings of 
 this strength of his. ' Yes,' we say as we read 
 them, ' the kingdom of this rare sweet song is like 
 the kingdom of heaven ; one must enter it like a 
 little child.' 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 19 
 
 The Songs of Innocence are the poems by which 
 Blake is chiefly known, and they were published in 
 1789, when the roar of the French Revolution 
 began to throb in the ears of men, so strange are 
 the contrasts of this world. The book sang of 
 the simplest things, of pastoral and city life, of the 
 shepherd and the lambs, of the charity boys and 
 the chimney-sweep, of the common earth, of 
 mother's love and of the love of God. In this 
 choice of homely subject, in this naturalness of 
 emotion and expression, in this theme of the human 
 heart, these songs are the prelude to the Lyrical 
 Ballads, The critics of the time, when they read 
 JVe are Seven or of the charity children going 
 to St. Paul's, said that Wordsworth was a fool and 
 that Blake was mad. ' Misshapen wretch,' they 
 cried, as their blear eyes bent over the baby of the 
 new poetry in his cradle, ' the child is babbling like an 
 idiot.' But the child grew and sang so sweetly that 
 all the world, pleased to be in the dewy woods 
 of life again, listened and rejoiced. Blake in the 
 Songs of Innocence brought the child to life. It is 
 part of their historical place in English poetry. 
 
 Another part of their historical place is — that 
 they are the first clear full example of that idea of 
 the Revolution which is expressed in the term ' the 
 return to Nature.' It is not by any means the 
 first time that the idea was expressed in English 
 poetry. It had been appearing in all the poets who 
 succeeded Pope, but it appeared mingled up with 
 the ideas of the past poetry. In Blake for the first 
 
ao STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 time it appeared unmingled with the past, and 
 
 prophesying the future poetry. 
 
 ,_<>^^ As to the songs themselves, they are as gay, as 
 
 x^c'^, sweet, as musical, and as tender as the song of a 
 
 ►^ mother -bird over her nestlings when the sunny 
 
 wind is playing in the tree ; such songs as a child 
 
 who had the wisdom of an angel might sing as it 
 
 wandered in the flowery glades of Eden. They are 
 
 "^^ all of transient emotion, felt, realised, and left behind. 
 
 But the transiency does not mean want of depth of 
 
 feeling. The rapidity of change arises, not from 
 
 carelessness of the present impression, but from the 
 
 extreme vividness with which the impression that 
 
 replaces it is felt. This, which is almost unknown 
 
 in adult life, is of the very nature of a child ; and 
 
 Blake himself realised the equally passionate and 
 
 ,^^, transient character of his impressions ; and that they 
 
 were in this of the temper of a child. 
 
 Then the whole atmosphere of the little book is 
 that of guileless joy. When the babe is born, he 
 cries : 
 
 \ V 1^ Sweet joy but two days old. 
 
 ^ Sweet joy I call thee. 
 
 Thou dost smile, 
 I sing the while ; 
 Sweet joy befall thee ! 
 
 * I have no name — 
 
 I am but two days old.' 
 What shall I call thee ? 
 
 * I happy am, 
 Joy is my name.' 
 Sweet joy befall thee i 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 21 
 
 When the boy looks at Nature he hears everything 
 laugh with joy : 
 
 When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, 
 And the dimpling stream runs laughing by ; 
 When the air does laugh with our merry wit, 
 And the green hill laughs with the noise of it. 
 
 And the life lived in them is also that which forms 
 so large an element in a child's heart — a life of the 
 gayest, wildest, quaintest, most unreasoning fantasy, 
 of images of fairy creatures, of animals living and 
 talking to mankind, of birds and insects and all 
 living things at play among themselves and with us, 
 of flowers and trees and clouds, alive and in delight ; 
 of dreams that are realities and realities that are 
 dreams. Joy and imagination are the king and 
 queen of the world, and their child is love — love of 
 the old folk sitting under the tree and watching the 
 children at play on the village green, of the lamb 
 wandering by the stream, of the robin under the 
 blossom, of the merry sparrow swift as an arrow, of 
 the bells dancing in the sky, of the song of the 
 nurse while the hills echo to the shouts of the 
 children, of the talk of the glow-worm and the 
 emmet, of the little boy lost, of the pity of man 
 for the world, of all things gracious, gentle, inno- 
 cent, and tender. These are the daily wonders of 
 the wonderful world that happy artist knew and sang 
 and painted, and they are the wonders of a child. 
 
 The religion of the songs is as simple as their 
 joy. There is no prayer in it, nothing but praise, 
 praise for the loveliness of the world where he saw 
 
22 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 angels walking in the fields and in every flower a 
 fairy of God. God was the Father of all, and took 
 care of them, and was delighted to take care of 
 them. When we read a little poem like "The 
 Lamb we understand how this wise poet felt about 
 the world. It was a world of everyday love and 
 beauty in common life, but it was also that quaint 
 enchanted world which children create for God and 
 the angels, and of which they talk so seriously. 
 Take, for example, verses like these : 
 
 The sun descending in the west, 
 The evening star does shine ; 
 The birds are silent in their nest, 
 And I must seek for mine. 
 The moon, like a flower, 
 In heaven's high bower, 
 With silent delight 
 Sits and smiles in the night. 
 
 Farewell, green fields and happy groves, 
 Where flocks have took delight. 
 Where lambs have nibbled, silent moves 
 The feet of angels bright ; 
 Unseen, they pour blessing. 
 And joy without ceasing, 
 On each bud and blossom, 
 And each sleeping bosom. 
 
 They look in every thoughtless nest. 
 Where birds are cover'd warm ; 
 They visit caves of every beast, 
 To keep them from all harm. 
 If they see any weeping 
 That should have been sleeping. 
 They pour sleep on their head, 
 And sit down by their bed. 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 23 
 
 What a world ! And when into the midst of it 
 steps the lion, with ruddy eyes and tears of gold, 
 and watches the whole world's fold for God, and lies 
 down with the lamb to sleep — then the creative 
 imagination of a man has entered into the child's 
 heart, and we possess that mingling of both which 
 is distinct in English song ; — the only soil in which 
 lyrics like these come to a perfect flowerage. 
 
 The Songs of Experience succeeded, five years later, 
 the Songs of Innocence. The title tells us what they 
 mean. They are the reversal of the Songs of Inno- 
 cence^ the result of knowing good and evil. Even 
 the titles of the greater number are the same as those 
 of the Songs of Innocence^ as if Blake wished us to 
 know the double face which the world presented to 
 him. I have quoted Infant Joy, Here is Infant 
 Sorrow^ as Blake engraved it for the Songs of Expert^ 
 ence^ and when we remember its predecessor we know 
 what he was trying to do in the Songs of Experience. 
 
 My mother groan'd, my father wept, 
 Into the dangerous world I leapt ; 
 Helpless, naked, piping loud, 
 Like a fiend hid in a cloud. 
 
 Struggling in my father's hands. 
 Striving against my swadling-bands, 
 Bound and weary, I thought best 
 To sulk upon my mother's breast. 
 
 Most of the others are set over in the same way, 
 in fierce realisation of misery and pain, against the 
 innocent life he had celebrated ; and the horror is 
 as unmixed, as ungradated, as the pleasure and beauty 
 
24 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 were. Among all the Songs of Experience there are 
 only a few, like The Little Girl Lost and Found^ which 
 are not dark with pain and sin and sorrow. 
 
 Even here the child-nature bears its fruit. Blake's 
 unmodified horror is not that of an experienced man, 
 but such as a child would feel, who, suddenly taken 
 from his mother's garden, found himself in the dark 
 walls of a prison. All its ugliness, tolerable to those 
 who knew it, would be seen with loathing unspeak- 
 able by the child. Blake In this way saw the most 
 dreadful side of dreadful things ; more than we see ; 
 and he could not distinguish, as we do, any touches 
 of light in the darkness. His expression, therefore, of 
 experience was as exaggerated towards misery as his 
 expression of innocence may seem to us exaggerated 
 towards joy — and this is just the temper of a child 
 towards the pain and pleasure, the evil and the good 
 of the world. We have it here in a man, and an 
 interesting problem it is. In both his pictures of 
 the world, there are no gradations. Nevertheless, 
 this was of use to him in his art. There is nothing 
 like the burning whiteness of some of the Songs of 
 Innocence in the whole of literature. He touches, 
 without danger, and without shame of fear, the 
 lightnings of the sword of innocence. We get the 
 archetypes of good. And now we get the archetypes 
 of evil. The same hand which drew the Lamb in 
 
 ^ These two poems on Lyca and her parents belong rather to the 
 Songs of Innocence. I think they were a reversion to their type. There 
 are two other poems in the Songs of Experience — A Little Boy Lost, and 
 another, A Little Girl Lost — which are as ghastly as those on Lyca are 
 lovely. 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 25 
 
 its essence drew also, with a fierceness of imagination, 
 the fiercest of all beasts — not a tiger, but all tigers 
 in one — the essential tiger. 
 
 Then, dreadfully opposed to the unchartered 
 forgiveness of the Songs of Innocence^ is the savage 
 revenge, the very concentration of malice and hate, 
 unmixed with any touch of relief, of the poem, 
 A Poison "Tree. There is no dulness in hatred like 
 this. It is driven and wrought by imagination. 
 Webster alone might have approached it. 
 
 I was angry with my friend : 
 
 I told my wrath, my wrath did end. 
 
 I was angry with my foe : 
 
 I told it not, my wrath did grow. 
 
 And I watered it in fears, 
 Night and morning, with my tears ; 
 And I sunned it with smiles, 
 And with soft deceitful wiles. 
 
 And it grew both day and night, 
 Till it bore an apple bright ; 
 And my foe beheld it shine. 
 And he knew that it was mine. 
 
 And into my garden stole 
 
 When the night had veiled the pole : 
 
 In the morning glad I see 
 
 My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree. 
 
 These intense extremes are very rare in literature. 
 
 The next thing to say about these Songs of Experi- 
 ence belongs in part to the history of the nineteenth 
 century's early poetry. It is their sympathy with 
 the aggressive ideas of the Revolution. Blake was 
 a born Republican. Of all the men with whom he 
 
26 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 associated (and the story goes that he saved Tom 
 Paine from the gallows), he was the only one who 
 donned in the open streets the red cap of the 
 Republic. Long before Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
 he put the militant ideas of the Revolution into 
 verse. Shelley himself never spoke more fiercely 
 of kings and priestcraft, of tyrannic fraud, force and 
 oppression than Blake, full of wrath and menace, 
 did in 1794, and in the prophetic books. 
 
 The America^ one of these, takes as its theme the 
 War of Independence, and the angels of Albion, 
 who fight with the angels of the States, are not 
 spared in the combat. Like Wordsworth, like 
 Coleridge, he stood for the liberty of mankind against 
 his own country. Patriotism was merged — that 
 essential difference of the Revolution — in love of 
 all mankind. Here is a passage which gives some 
 idea of the loudness of Blake's cry for liberty. 
 Humanity wakes, like us, at the sun-rising. 
 
 The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their 
 
 stations, 
 The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrappM up ; 
 The bones of death, the covering clay, the sinews shrunk and 
 
 dried, 
 Reviving, shake, inspiring, move, breathing, awakening, — 
 Spring, like redeemM captives when their bonds and bars are 
 
 burst. 
 Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field. 
 Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air ; 
 Let the enchainM soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing. 
 Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years. 
 Rise, and look out ! His chains are loose, his dungeon doors are 
 
 open. 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 27 
 
 But he was much fiercer than that. Under the 
 symbol of the Kings of Asia he represents the 
 despots of Europe and their manner of getting their 
 own way with the people. He makes them set afoot, 
 with the help of the priesthood, famine and pesti- 
 lence that the people may be slain. The Kings run 
 out of their ancient woven dens. 
 
 And the Kings of Asia stood, 
 
 And cried in bitterness of soul — 
 * Shall not the King call for Famine from the heath, 
 And the Priest for Pestilence from the fen. 
 To restrain, to dismay, to thin 
 The inhabitants of mountain and plain ? ' 
 
 Still more bitter and savage is the poem entitled 
 Lafayette. In it the King and Queen of France 
 consult what they shall do to bring the people to 
 obedience. And the Queen orders temptation to 
 vice to be doubled in the Paris streets so that 
 pestilence may fly through them. And she calls for 
 the army to consume the food of Paris that the 
 people may be starved. These are the methods, he 
 thought, of Kings — 
 
 The strongest poison ever known 
 Came from Cassar's laurel crown. 
 
 1 
 The attack on priestcraft, on its religion of terror 
 
 and restraint, on the inhuman God it made, on its 
 dogmatic creeds by which it kept men slaves, was 
 equally vigorous. His poem of "^he Little Boy Lost 
 is a direct blow at the cruelty of a religion which 
 replaces natural love by authority as the basis of 
 
28 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 religion. The priest slays the child because it says 
 it loves its father not because it is told to do so 
 but out of its own heart. ' Lo ! what a fiend is 
 here,' he cries, 
 
 One who sets reason up for judge 
 Of our most holy mystery ; 
 
 and he burns the child alive in a holy place. ^ Are 
 such things,' Blake asks, ' done on Albion's shore ? ' 
 and the proper answer would be, since 'the poem is 
 symbolic, that they were and are done. In another 
 ;^ poem, T^he Grey Monk^ the monk declares that all 
 . - * he has written has been the bane of every one he 
 loved, and let loose on earth starvation, torture, 
 misery, and war. Blake is especially furious with 
 the use the priesthood in all ages have made of 
 devilish means — of force and fraud — to establish the 
 Kingdom of God. This is damnable, he thinks, 
 and so it is. The world is saved and made divine 
 by other weapons of war. And these are they : 
 
 But vain the Sword and vain the Bow, 
 They never can work War's o'erthrow. 
 The Hermit's Prayer, the Widow's Tear 
 Alone can free the World from fear. 
 
 For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing, 
 And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King, 
 And the bitter groan of the Martyr's woe 
 Is an Arrow from the Almightie's Bow. 
 
 Another stanza from another manuscript of the 
 poem explains more fully the last verse : 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 29 
 
 But the tear of love — and forgiveness sweet, 
 And submission to death beneath his feet — 
 The tear shall melt the sword of steel, 
 And every wound it has made shall heal. 
 
 This is the very temper of Shelley thirty years 
 before he wrote, so far forward did Blake reach. 
 He reached further still : he reached into the social 
 interests of the poetry which followed 1832. The 
 things which concern the state of the poor, the 
 starvation, misery, harlotry, cruelty to animals, the 
 gambling passion which made guilt and hate and 
 sorrow — 
 
 The harlot's cry from street to street 
 Shall weave Old England's winding-sheet. 
 The winner's shout, the loser's curse 
 Shall dance before dead England's hearse. 
 
 all that went against poetry — these were his interests 
 at a time when no one felt much about them. He 
 seized them as subjects of art more than a hundred 
 years ago. In the Holy 'Thursday^ in 'The Chimney- 
 Sweeper^ in the concentrated wrath of the little poem 
 called London^ we might think we heard — so modern 
 it is — the utterance of those who among us now have 
 ceased to believe in God because He permits the 
 misery of the poor. I have no space in which to 
 quote these poems in full, but to complete this 
 sketch of the modernness of this work, so strange 
 more than a century ago, Blake takes up the theory 
 which is still stated, to the shame of those that 
 state it, ' That the poor shall never cease out of 
 the land, and that, if they did, Mercy and Pity 
 
30 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 would lessen, and Charity have no reason.' This is 
 given in a wild song called "The Human Abstract^ but 
 it is best put in a poem from the Rossetti MS. : 
 
 I heard an Angel singing 
 When the day was springing : 
 
 * Mercy, pity, and peace 
 Is the world's release.' 
 
 Thus he sang all day 
 Over the new-mown hay, 
 Till the sun went down, 
 And haycocks looked brown. 
 
 I heard a Devil curse 
 
 Over the heath and the furze : 
 
 * Mercy would be no more 
 If there was nobody poor, 
 
 And pity no more would be 
 If all were as happy as we.' 
 At his curse the sun went down 
 And the heavens gave a frown. 
 
 These were some of the prophetic anticipations of 
 the man, and they make his small piece of poetic 
 work important in the history of poetry. There 
 were others, as his love of animals, but I will treat 
 of them in the answer to another question. 
 
 That question is — How far did Blake represent 
 the naturalism which was reborn in English poetry 
 after the artificial school of Pope, and also the 
 romanticism which grew into poetry out of this 
 naturalism ? 
 
 The naturalism consisted in a reversion, with a 
 new manner, new thought, and in new circumstances, 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 31 
 
 to the profound interest in the whole of human 
 nature which characterised Chaucer and the Eliza- 
 bethans, to all its phases in all ranks and in all 
 countries — and it was mixed with a growing interest 
 in the nature of animals. This was one side of the 
 naturalism. The other side was an eager increase 
 in the love of the natural world, which passed from 
 interest in it as a background for human life into an 
 interest in it, even a passion for it, for its own sake. 
 Some of the elements of the romanticism which 
 followed on this naturalism grew partly and naturally 
 out of it. Others grew up independently of it, but 
 were nourished by its atmosphere. The statement 
 of what these elements were, and how they arose, 
 would require a long essay and cannot be done 
 here. What can be done is to mark briefly how 
 far Blake was naturalist and how far romantic. 
 Blake's naturalism is plain enough. It consists in,^ 
 his direct painting of certain very simple, as well 
 as of very obscure, phases of human nature as yet 
 scarcely touched by the English poets ; and in an 
 extremely simple, passionate, and spiritual treatment 
 of both phases, as if the human nature in them 
 belonged less to this earth than to the whole 
 universe of spirit. One of these simple phases was 
 the nature of childhood. We have already seen 
 how important he made the child in English poetry. 
 Moreover, he placed our natural love of animals, 
 and our pity for them, on a higher level than ever 
 it had been before. Indeed, he introduced it in a 
 new and more serious shape into English poetry ; 
 
32 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 and he shares it, before Wordsworth touched it, 
 with Cowper and Burns. His tender song about 
 the Lamb mingles its life up with the life of 
 children, with the Divine Child, and with God the 
 Father. The sheep feed through his poetry on a 
 thousand hills in silent delight. The angels visit the 
 caves of the wild animals and look into the nests of 
 the birds to keep them from harm, and to pour 
 sleep on their heads. God, who smiles on all, ^ hears 
 the wren with sorrows small.' ' Arise,' he cries — 
 
 Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy, 
 Arise and drink your bliss ! 
 For everything that lives is holy. 
 
 But this tenderness went further than either Cowper 
 or Burns. In Blake's mysticism the animals became 
 spiritual, at one with man and God, part of a 
 living universe — visible symbols of invisible reahties. 
 Lyca's parents, seeking their lost child, come on a 
 crouching lion and are terrified, but soon comforted, 
 for 
 
 They look upon his eyes 
 FilTd with deep surprise ; 
 And wondering behold 
 A Spirit arm'd in gold. 
 
 On his head a crown ; 
 On his shoulders down 
 Flow'd his golden hair. 
 Gone was all their care. 
 
 * Follow me,' he said, 
 < Weep not for the maid ; 
 In my palace deep 
 Lyca lies asleep.' 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 33 
 
 This is the lion who watches the fold of humanity, 
 when the sheep of the great Shepherd are sleeping. 
 He extended the same feeling to all animals. To 
 be cruel to animals, to limit their liberty, not to 
 recognise their kindred to us, was a black iniquity — 
 a spirit in man which injured not only those who 
 possessed it, but the whole State. Against it the 
 spiritual world was in revolt. 
 
 A Robin Redbreast in a Cage 
 Puts all Heaven in a Rage ! 
 A Dog starved at his Master's Gate 
 Predicts the ruin of the State. 
 A Horse misused upon the Road 
 Calls to Heaven for Human blood. 
 Each outcry of the hunted Hare 
 A fibre from the Brain does tear. 
 A Skylark wounded on the wing 
 A Cherubim does cease to sing. 
 
 He who shall hurt the little Wren 
 Shall never be belov'd by men. 
 The wanton Boy that kills the Fly 
 Shall feel the Spider's enmity. 
 He who torments the Chafer's sprite 
 Weaves a Bower in endless Night. 
 The Catterpillar on the leaf 
 Repeats to thee thy Mother's grief. 
 Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly 
 For the Last Judgment draweth nigh. 
 
 Then, in the happy world in which Blake lived, 
 animals have a life of their own with one another. 
 They talk together ; they love and help one another. 
 The Emmet has lost its way (I give a single example). 
 
34 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 like a child in a wood, among the tall grass. Blake 
 hears its crying and pities it, but he cannot help it. 
 Then the Glow-worm intervenes, and Blake hears 
 its voice. ^ O my children/ cries the Emmet, ' do 
 they cry ? Do they hear their father sigh ? ' 
 
 Pitying, I drop'd a tear ; 
 But I saw a glow-worm near, 
 Who replied : What wailing wight 
 Calls the watchman of the night ? 
 
 I am set to light the ground. 
 While the beetle goes his round. 
 Follow now the beetle's hum ; 
 Little Wanderer, hie thee home. 
 
 Nothing can be prettier, more full of life and love, 
 than the world in which that little thing is conceived. 
 This is a part of his naturalism. 
 
 Of the other side of it, of naturalism as concerned 
 not with human or animal nature, but with the 
 natural world outside of ourselves, I have written a 
 little in the previous pages. I gave a few instances 
 of his love of Nature for her own sake, such love as 
 led us directly to Wordsworth. But it is necessary 
 now to say that his love of Nature was not so much 
 the love of outward Nature, as of the spiritual life 
 of which Nature was but the sensible form. What 
 we saw and heard with eyes and ears was a happy 
 illusion ; what was behind phenomena, that was the 
 thing to love, admire, and with which to company. 
 And when he passed beyond the flowers and the 
 cloud, the stream and hill, into the living beings they 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 35 
 
 were, the realms in which he found himself were 
 beautiful beyond compare in thought and sweet 
 emotion. Thel, one of the daughters of the Sera- 
 phim, complains of the passing of all things, of her 
 uselessness and theirs, and would lay her down and 
 die. And the spiritual beings of the Lily and the 
 Cloud, the Worm and the Clod of Clay answer her 
 in lines too long to quote, but of so sweet, so 
 beautiful a tenderness and spirituality, that they 
 seem to transmute the universe and all its life from 
 matter into spirit, from death and pain into life and 
 love. 
 
 This is the realm in which we finally find Blake's 
 naturalism when it has to do with the love of the 
 natural world — a very different thing indeed from 
 the love of Nature in the other poets. They cele- 
 brate the world the senses perceive, he that which 
 is in the spirit. It is the supernaturalism of this 
 species of naturalism. Yet in the higher poets 
 who followed him there was something of this 
 emotional thought of Blake's contained, at least 
 theoretically contained. Shelley and Wordsworth 
 saw infinite Thought and Love behind the appearance 
 of Nature, but they gave full weight to that which 
 the senses perceived. Blake did not ; what we per- 
 ceived was illusion, hid the reality but suggested it. 
 What underlay illusion was the actual, and it was as 
 real to Blake as our sensible world is to us — the fools 
 of what we see and hear and feel. 
 
 We are led to believe a lie S ^ ' * " 
 
 When we see with, not through, the eye ; 
 
36 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Or, expressed more clearly — 
 
 To see a World in a Grain of Sand, 
 And a Heaven in a Wild Flower ; 
 
 Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand. 
 And Eternity in an hour. 
 
 His symbolic use of natural objects, being a part 
 of his pure mysticism, does not come within the 
 scope of this essay, but is curiously interesting and 
 imaginative. The Sun, the Moon, the Stars, moun- 
 tains, streams, flowers, are loaded with spiritual 
 meanings. When this is done by other poets, their 
 work on the whole is neither suggestive nor exciting. 
 But this symbolic world was Blake's native country, 
 and he breathed its air with ease and joy. He was 
 satisfied with knowing his own meaning in such 
 verses, and quite indifferent about their compre- 
 hension by others ; but since they are poetically 
 expressed, they not only kindle the imagination of 
 the reader, but also awaken a futile but agreeable 
 curiosity which has nothing to do with poetry or 
 the love of poetry. Beyond that curiosity, there 
 is in them an attractive mystery as of a world 
 unknown. When we read them, it is as if a door 
 were momentarily opened into a world hidden from 
 us, but of which we are capable of becoming 
 citizens. I quote two little lyrics of this kind. 
 
 DAY 
 
 The Sun arises in the East 
 
 Cloth'd in robes of blood and gold, 
 
 Swords and spears and wrath increast 
 All around his bosom roU'd, 
 
 CrounM with warlike fires and raging desires. 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 37 
 
 SOFT SNOW .IVf^k?^*'^ 
 
 I walked abroad on a snowy day : "^^^ - ' 
 
 I ask'd the soft snow with me to play : 
 She play'd and she mehed in all her prime ; 
 And the winter called it a dreadful crime. 
 
 On the whole this naturalism of Blake's ended in a 
 fantastic but serious super naturalism, his own, his 
 very own. 
 
 How far he was romantic is another question. 
 Some of his younger work, like his imitations of 
 Ossian, and two wild ballads, belong to that reversion 
 to the romantic past which was a feature of the time. 
 But he soon left this behind, and I cannot trace any 
 more of it in his later poetry. Mysticism over- 
 whelmed it. Again, the melancholy note which 
 Young introduces, which was so large an element 
 in romanticism both in England and on the 
 Continent, and which has lasted on into our own 
 time, Blake had nothing to do with. The main 
 element of his life and imagination was joy. And 
 when he saw evil, it awakened in him no sentimental 
 melancholy, but wrath, fury, the fiercest words, 
 white fire of abhorrence — anything but melancholy. 
 He thought little of the sorrow, failures, and trials 
 of earth, still less of death, over which the romantics 
 wail. Some are born, he says, to misery, some to 
 sweet delight. In the delight sorrow is intertwined ; 
 in the sorrow joy. This is the truth ; to realise it is 
 to be at rest within, and safe in the storms. 
 
 Joy and woe are woven fine, 
 A clothing for the soul divine ; 
 
38 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Under every grief and pine 
 Runs a joy with silken twine. 
 It is right it should be so ; 
 Man was made for joy and woe ; 
 And, when this we rightly know. 
 Safely through the world we go. 
 
 Two elements, however, characterising the 
 romantics, emerged in Blake. One was an im- 
 passioned, over-weening individuality, which said, 
 I am I ; I am the whole world ; I am God Himself. 
 hOf that there is not much to say in an essay 
 [kbout his poetry. It belonged to his mystic 
 .■jphilosophy, if we can call it a philosophy ; and 
 the turn it took in him carried him away from 
 all the forms into which this dominance of indi- 
 viduality was shaped by the romantics. Another 
 was the element of wonder : and this arose from 
 the slow upgrowth in men — after a time of clear 
 intellectualism in which all the mystery of our- 
 selves and of life was supposed to be explained — 
 of a renewed sense of the mystery of life and the 
 world, of its unintelligible problems, and of the 
 sorrow and the wonder of the mystery. What are 
 we ? and what is the world ? Is it actual or phen- 
 omenal only ? What lies beneath the apparent ? 
 What beauty, what horror, what goodness, what 
 truth, what life, is behind the illusion in which we 
 live ? When we are ill, the questions make us 
 melancholy or miserable, and life is a vain searching, 
 a fruitless cry. When we are well, we live in an 
 endless wonder of the beauty and the truth of things. 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 39 
 
 A thousand phases of this appear in the poets of the 
 nineteenth century. The phase of it which appeared 
 in Blake was an emotional belief in a perfect world 
 in which a man could live within absolute beauty, 
 life, and love. This faith, with its inspiration, 
 hurries its possessor beyond the world of sense 
 into the spiritual. Not finding food enough on 
 earth for its longing after perfect beauty, love, and 
 knowledge, it creates a realm beyond this earth, 
 where sorrow is not, nor old age, nor any law but 
 love, and where the powers of genius immediately 
 shape the conceptions of imagination. This desire, 
 rising far away in early human nature, but in the 
 rudest forms, was at first only naturalist. It passed 
 into romanticism when it built up in thought a 
 beautiful and perfect earth and sky, hidden away in 
 the unknown oceans, where all was peace and love, 
 and death was not, nor pain, nor storm. The early 
 church created it in the home of the Phosnix for 
 the Latin race. The mediaevals placed it in the 
 fairy world where Ogier and his fellows found 
 immortal loves. The Irish invented Tir-na-nogue, 
 where Oisin lived three hundred years in joy. 
 It is in his exalting and changing the form of 
 this conception that we meet in Blake all the 
 romanticism of which he was now capable. He has 
 escaped from this limited and dying world into an 
 infinite and living world where all the sorrows of 
 earth are not. The world of Ogier and Oisin is still 
 material. Blake's world is immaterial. We fools 
 only believe, he says, in what we perceive, and what 
 
40 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 we perceive Imprisons us. We are really In an 
 Illimitable, multitudlnously peopled universe of Being ; 
 ^ and he called on us to loosen ourselves from the 
 bondage of phenomena, and to flee into the infinite 
 liberty of this spiritual realm. He did not put this 
 beautiful world, into the future or far away. We 
 could live In It now, If we chose, In Innocence 
 and unconsciousness of self ; In eternity and omni- 
 presence ; In the sinless freedom from all restrictive 
 law which is the dowry of perfect love ; in tender 
 joy, freed from fear, jealousy, and base desire ; in 
 that Incessant outgoing of love which, ever moving 
 away from self, finds Itself at home In every grain of 
 a universe which, made by the married Thought and 
 Love of Deity, rejoices for ever In the Beauty which 
 pervades it, and which is, It knows, the offspring of 
 Divine Thought and Love. ' Poor prisoners,' Blake 
 thought, ' of false imaginings, enchained by sense, 
 there is your home,' and he puts the longing for It 
 Into many lovely verses. In ^e Land of Dreams y 
 Earth has imprisoned the father and the boy. 
 The poem represents the passion of those who are 
 limited by the world of sense to escape from It : 
 
 Awake, awake, my little Boy ! 
 Thou wast thy Mother's only joy ; 
 Why dost thou weep in thy gentle sleep ? 
 Awake, thy Father does thee keep. 
 
 < O, what Land is the Land of Dreams ? 
 What are its Mountains, and what are its Streams ? 
 O Father ! I saw my Mother there. 
 Among the Lillies by waters fair. 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 41 
 
 * Among the lambs, clothM in white, 
 
 She walked with her Thomas in sweet delight. 
 
 I wept for joy, like a dove I mourn, 
 
 O, when shall I again return ? ' 
 
 Dear Child, I also by pleasant streams 
 
 Have wander'd all Night in the Land of Dreams ; 
 
 But tho' calm and warm the waters wide, 
 
 I could not get to the other side. 
 
 ' Father, O Father ! what do we here 
 In this Land of unbelief and fear ? 
 The Land of Dreams is better far. 
 Above the light of the Morning Star.' 
 
 That is the longing in Blake's romanticism. 
 
 Enough has been now said (enough for the scope 
 of this essay) of Blake's poetry as lyrical, as 
 naturalistic, or romantic. Another part of his work 
 — his mystical poetry — is not connected with the 
 general stream of English poetry; belongs neither 
 to the past nor the future of his time ; is a strange 
 backwater with its own scenery, its own flowers, 
 its own animal life. We may take our boat 
 into it out of the main stream, and row about its 
 strange waters, and forget all the other English 
 poetry for a time. There is little in it which recalls 
 the other poets. It is chiefly contained in the Pro- 
 phetic Books, with which this essay is not concerned. 
 It appears, however, in many short poems which 
 have a lyrical air. Some, like Mary^ the Golden 
 Net^ the Mental Traveller, the Crystal Cabinet, 
 William Bondy Long John Brown^ excite an intel- 
 lectual curiosity, but can scarcely be said to 
 
42 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 awaken the pleasure that poetry ought to bring 
 with it. What can be said for them is said 
 with imaginative penetration by Mr. Swinburne. 
 For my part, I desire a simpler world. It is only 
 at intervals, when the mystic worlds open like fans 
 before transitory moods, that men will love to sail on 
 the mystic water of this blue lagoon, fed, not by the 
 river of English poetry, but by deep-set fountains 
 of its own. It demands its own terms and it is not 
 difficult to learn them. But except we are very 
 curious to enter into its region, the effort is scarcely 
 worth our while, at least so far as the Prophetic 
 Books are concerned. 
 
 But with regard to certain lyrics which contain or 
 suggest Blake's views of religion, morality, and 
 social relations, our action must be different. Their 
 mysticism has a great deal to do with the problems 
 of practical life, with their imaginative and spiritual 
 treatment. In their mysticism appear certain stead- 
 fast elements which belong to the root of Blake's 
 genius and character. To isolate them will help us 
 to the further comprehension even of the Songs of 
 Innocence^ much more of the Songs of Experience. 
 
 The religious life of Blake is not a world in 
 which morality is confused with religion. The 
 moralities of society are left behind. The moral 
 law is therein abrogated, or rather, as law, it is 
 non-existent. Its indwellers love what is right and 
 need no commands and no forbiddings. ' Thou 
 shalt' and 'thou shalt not' have no meaning there. 
 One does not command a mother to love her child, 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 43 
 
 or forbid her to hate it. Love is the fulfilling of 
 the law, and as a restraining power law ceases to be. 
 That which the law orders is done, not because of 
 the law, but because of love of goodness and love. 
 Love takes duty in its stride. So far as morality is 
 concerned, this was the view of Blake, and being 
 an imaginative person and applying this principle 
 at many out-of-the-way points, and with a reckless 
 individuality, it led him into strange places of 
 thought. 
 
 With this view of love as the sole master 
 of life, a view held by almost every mystic, his 
 religion was one of mysticism. It was a mysticism 
 which never tried to reason out its faith, or to bind 
 it down into intellectual propositions. It let itself 
 fearlessly go into the infinite as into its proper home 
 and satisfaction. Once there, it felt that its concep- 
 tions, which took form out of its emotions concern- 
 ing God and man, were absolutely right, and that 
 their rightness needed no proof. They proved 
 themselves by their being. They were. That was 
 enough. Blake felt that he thought with God and 
 God with him. And when he thought thus, he was 
 God and God was he. God and man were one. 
 
 In this exalted world of thought and its emotion, 
 the general opinions of society and of churches on 
 religion and on morality were not only thrown aside 
 by Blake, they were for the most part denounced 
 and abhorred by him. All reasoning on spiritual 
 truths, all scientific theology, was an abomination. 
 All conventional morality was devilish. All that 
 
44 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 belonged to the senses was utterly repudiated. He 
 does not care if his convictions violate all orthodox 
 doctrine and all orthodox morality. He stands out- 
 side of this world in another, and from that other 
 he speaks. With fearless step and with determined 
 air he marches, resolute in his individuality, into the 
 most tremendous labyrinths, and losing himself often 
 therein, neither confesses nor knows that he is lost. 
 Nay, in losing himself, he thinks to find himself. 
 
 In speaking of the Songs of Experience I said that 
 Blake, looking on what seemed to him evil, that is 
 on any violation of love, saw it with the horror 
 with which innocence would see it. That was not 
 the way in which he saw merely physical evil. He 
 I saw the pain of the world arising from the course of 
 nature, and he had a great pity for it. But he had 
 no horror of this, no hatred of it. If it came upon 
 a happy inward spirit, it was so balanced, so modified, 
 that it was scarcely to be considered as an evil. It 
 was the common lot of man, and out of it arose or 
 ought to arise fortitude, faith, and inward joy. 
 
 Joy and Woe are woven fine, 
 A clothing for the soul divine. 
 Under every grief and pine 
 Runs a joy with silken twine. 
 
 The case was different when he saw the physical 
 '^ and spiritual evil brought on man by cruel beliefs 
 concerning God, by intolerant condemnations, by 
 restrictive laws which used force to promote morality 
 or orthodox belief. He pitied those who suffered 
 from these villainies, but he turned with wrath on 
 
f UNIVERSITY ) 
 
 \^Au^r.^^ywiLLIAM BLAKE 45 
 
 those who made them sufFer. He denounced in his 
 poems, and all through the prophetic books, the 
 priests who invented an unforgiving God, the 
 theologians who maintained the rightness of the 
 jealous Jehovah of the Jews, the atheists (for he 
 struck all round) who, having no sense of the 
 spiritual love which releases and comforts the guilty, 
 insisted on the rigid moral law, invented over again 
 the curse of its rewards and punishments, and limited 
 the natural outgoing of man's natural desires. 
 
 These commandment-makers — the enemies of 
 love, the supporters of hatred and cruelty, tyrants 
 who used force to blockade the liberty of the soul — 
 were the cause of the real evil of the world. He 
 is never weary of picturing the devastation they 
 make, and the wickedness of their work. 
 
 Love, not law, was the test of all action. Where 
 love was, there was righteousness ; where law was, 
 sin was sure to be. The law, by forbidding, 
 awakened the desire to sin. Where love was, freedom 
 was ; where law ruled, slavery prevailed. Where 
 love lived, forgiveness reigned and saved ; where 
 law was master, cruelty, oppression, and misery 
 degraded the conscience, weakened the intelligence 
 and destroyed the body and soul of men. This re- 
 straining law was imposed on man by the Jehovah 
 of the Jews, whom Blake looked on as a severe 
 Pharisee, and whose image was made by the selfish, 
 exacting, oppressive, unforgiving, jealous, and en- 
 slaving elements in the nature of man. 
 
 From this hard, angry, exacting God, who forced 
 
46 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 man to sin when he laid down the fierce sanctions of 
 the law — our Great Forbidder, as Eve called him 
 in Milton's poem — ^Jesus, Blake declared, had set 
 us free. He took away, so far as it forbade, re- 
 strained, and commanded, the moral law, and gave 
 us back to love. 
 
 He laid His hand on Moses' Law ; 
 The ancient heavens, in silent awe, i 
 
 Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole, 
 All away began to roll. 
 
 Jesus did not, of his own will, punish sin. It had to 
 reap its results, but He was not angry with it. He 
 forgave it utterly. And in forgiving it. He saved 
 us from it. Sin could not live in a man when he 
 knew it was forgiven by God. When Jesus destroyed 
 'thou shalt* and 'thou shalt not,' He established in 
 their stead the forgiveness of infinite love. The true 
 punishment of sin was God's forgiveness of it ; and 
 the forgiveness was also its redemption. And this 
 was just as true for man in his relation to God. 
 Not till men forgave God for all the ill they 
 thought He had done to them could they love God, 
 and lose, in that love and in their own loving which 
 forgave, the sense of sin and the desire to sin. God's 
 forgiveness of man and man's forgiveness of God, 
 these were the gates of paradise. They were built 
 and established by love, and love itself was paradise. 
 Then Blake carried this doctrine of forgiveness 
 further — to the relation between m.an and man. 
 We are bound to forgive all wrong done to us, be- 
 cause we ourselves do wrong to our fellows and need 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 47 
 
 their forgiveness ; and our salvation and that of our 
 comrades lie in our mutual forgiveness. When we 
 resent the injuries another has done us, we increase 
 his injuriousness, and we nourish our own anger 
 into greater desire to do wrong to him ; but when 
 we forgive his hatred, we forget our own, and we 
 set the other free from his. Till we are forgiven 
 we must go on hating and injuring and sinning. 
 ^ I have forgiven you/ cries one wrong-doer to 
 another, ^ and you are redeemed. When wilt thou 
 redeem me by forgiving me ? Then the salvation 
 of both will be fulfilled.' 
 
 And throughout all Eternity 
 I forgive you, you forgive me. 
 As our dear Redeemer said : 
 This the Wine and this the Bread. 
 
 In forgiveness of sins there is self-annihilation. 
 When absolute forgiveness is given by all, there 
 is soon nothing left to forgive. It is the avenging 
 punishment of sin which makes fresh sin ; it is the 
 ruthless punishment of crime which doubles crime. 
 
 Then he applied this doctrine of love issuing in 
 forgiveness, of love setting men free from restrict- 
 ing law, to human life ; and first with regard to 
 the desires and passion of love between the sexes. 
 These desires were natural and in themselves not 
 wrong. It was the laws made by priests to restrict 
 and bind them down which turned their satisfaction 
 into sin ; and those who condemned the satisfaction 
 of them as the worst of sins were far more guilty 
 than those they condemned. The weakness of desire 
 
48 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 yielded to through love, even when It was wrong, 
 would have far more excuse with God than the 
 calculated repression of desire when it ended in the 
 moral pride that condemned those that erred, and 
 in the cruelty which ruined their lives. The harlot 
 who really loved would have more forgiveness from 
 God than the intolerant Pharisee who thought her 
 touch defilement ; or than the ascetic who, having 
 crushed in himself the impulse of passion, set him- 
 self to crush it out of humanity. 
 
 Then he took the same principle of the evil of 
 restriction into the realm of mutual love. In the 
 short poem of The Clod and the Pebble he contrasts 
 two forms of human love. One is a love which 
 always makes a heaven. It does not bind love 
 down by any selfish chains. It has neither jealousy 
 nor fear nor forbidding nor commands. The 
 other love binds, is jealous, irritates, cries out — ' I 
 must have all to myself.' It is not love at all, it is 
 self-love ; and it makes life a hell. 
 
 * Love seeketh not Itself to please, 
 Nor for itself hath any care, 
 
 But for another gives its ease, 
 
 And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.' 
 
 So sung a little Clod of Clay, 
 Trodden with the cattle's feet. 
 But a Pebble of the brook 
 Warbled out these metres meet : 
 
 * Love seeketh only Self to please, 
 To bind another to Its delight, 
 Joys in another's loss of ease. 
 
 And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.' 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 49 
 
 The children of this emprisoning, evil form of love 
 are jealousy which tortures and fear which degrades, 
 and it has made love into a violation of love. 
 ' Return/ cries the bard, to Earth, ' resume your 
 ancient and lovely realm ; set love free/ And Earth 
 answers, her locks covered with grey despair, ' I can- 
 not ; jealousy, selfish fear, enforced abstinence have 
 chained me and my indwellers. I am cursed by a law 
 which has made me sin and forced me to know it/ 
 
 Break this heavy chain 
 
 That does freeze my bones around. 
 
 Selfish ! vain 1 
 
 Eternal bane ! 
 
 That free Love with bondage bound. 
 
 This is the motive of a number of lyrics varied 
 through various circumstances. 'To my Mirtle^ though 
 one of the shortest, is perhaps the most forcible. 
 
 To a lovely mirtle bound. 
 Blossoms show'ring all around, 
 O how weak and weary I 
 Underneath my mirtle lie ! 
 Why should I be bound to thee, 
 O my lovely myrtle tree : 
 
 "the Angel, A Little Girl Lost, To Tirzah, My Pretty 
 Rose Tree, all illustrate this view of his — that the 
 limitations of love, created by law, have been fatal 
 to the happiness and goodness of man. In one fierce 
 verse he cries aloud his anger at one result of the law : 
 
 Abstinence sows sand all over 
 
 The ruddy limbs and flaming hair, 
 
 But Desire Gratified 
 
 Plants fruits of life and beauty there. 
 D 
 
50 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Then he turns on the religion which has adopted 
 the pharisaic view of love. It says ' thou shalt 
 not * to all bodily desires ; it invents new sins, 
 doubles and trebles the restrictions of natural pas- 
 sion, and is the curse of mankind. By this iniquity 
 the Garden of Love is turned into a black grave- 
 yard : 
 - *v y 1 went to the Garden of Love, 
 
 And saw what I never had seen : 
 A Chapel was built in the midst, 
 
 Where I used to play on the green. 
 
 And the gates of this Chapel were shut, 
 And « Thou shalt not ' writ over the door ; 
 
 So I turned to the Garden of Love 
 That so many sweet flowers bore ; 
 
 And I saw it was fillM with graves, 
 
 And tombstones where flowers should be : 
 
 And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds. 
 And binding with briars my joys and desires. 
 
 It is fitting to state plainly these views of Blake 
 on a delicate subject. They underlie far more of 
 his poems than those I have mentioned. Their 
 spirit runs even through the Songs of Innocence. 
 It pervades some of the prophetic books, into whose 
 labyrinths I do not venture here. It appeared 
 frequently in his conversation. It amazed some 
 friends, it distressed others, and it was one of the 
 reasons why he was called mad. It was a beloved 
 theory, but it always, with Blake, remained a theory. 
 It was never put into practice. The man was as 
 innocent of indulgence as the dawn. He knew 
 that in a world socially constituted as his and ours. 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 51 
 
 free love would entail untold sorrow and shame on 
 women, even on men ; and therefore to practise it 
 would be a sin against love who was his master 
 spirit. In this matter then, while he held to his 
 principle, he omitted its practice ; he would even 
 have condemned it till the whole spirit of society 
 was changed from selfishness to love. 
 
 There are many who hold these views but who 
 never put them into action. But they speak of 
 them as a protest against those who, dividing the 
 body from the soul, have made the natural desires 
 of the body into stains on the soul, and have by 
 savage legality created sins and multiplied sins. 
 Again, there are many who hold these views and 
 practise them recklessly, and then they have been 
 the cause of some of the greatest villainies that have 
 defiled the earth. I do not think that Blake would 
 have had any mercy on such men till they passed 
 from the state of selfishness into that of love. In- 
 dulgence of this kind for the sake of money or 
 lust or power, for any reason whatever except that 
 of real love, would have been abhorrent to his 
 spiritual nature, which, on the other hand, took up 
 into the spiritual, and indeed as part of it, all 
 bodily desires directed by true love. The whole 
 theory, which is common enough in the thought 
 of men and women, is a theory which, while the 
 world is as it is, plays with fire. As long as those 
 who hold it refrain from acting it, we may discuss 
 it as a theory, especially as behind it sits the truth 
 — that there is no true union which is not of love. 
 
52 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 The principle here applied to sexual relations — that 
 the law by its restrictions made sin ; that the freedom 
 which came of love made right — Blake applied else- 
 where; to education and to religion. In education, all 
 restraint laid upon the young was wrong, and spoiled 
 the child. Children were born for joy , and were natu- 
 rally good. They will grow into greater goodness 
 if we let them live freely in their joy ; when they 
 are happy they are good. It is commanding this, 
 forbidding that, which makes them into evil-doers. 
 Even forcing them to learn is a pity. If we let 
 them learn of their own impulse, lead them gently 
 into what will interest them, they will get more of 
 what is right for them, of what they can use well 
 and beautifully, than they will by enforced educa- 
 tion. ' Thou shalt * and ' thou shalt not ' spoil the 
 whole nature of the child and injure his future life. 
 
 O ! father and mother — if buds be nip'd 
 
 And blossoms blown away, 
 
 And if the tender plants are strip'd 
 
 Of their joy in the springing day 
 
 By sorrow and care's dismay, 
 
 How shall the summer arise in joy 
 
 Or the summer fruits appear, 
 
 Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy, 
 
 Or bless the mellowing year. 
 
 When the blasts of winter appear ? 
 
 That, at any rate, is true. All our education, 
 domestic and national, vitally needs this principle 
 as its foundation. 
 
 In like manner the principle was applied by Blake 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE 53 
 
 to religion. Love was its first law, if that could 
 be called law which by its very nature was beyond 
 all law. Love left the spirit free to move into the 
 illimitable. Its world was above that of the senses 
 which deceived the soul. It was equally above the 
 work of the intellect when it forbade the spirit to 
 transcend its demonstrations. The passion of the 
 spirit for God, for perfection, for immortal life, and 
 all the spiritual truths that aspiring passion led us to 
 conceive, were seized on by the intellect, which had 
 no business to touch these infinite matters, and shut 
 up in a prison of formulas. The moods, the aspira- 
 tions, the forms, the free expansion of the spirit of 
 man into endless varieties of religious feeling and 
 expression, were forced to live under the intolerant 
 cruelties, and in the choking atmosphere of creeds, 
 confessions, and an enforced ritual. Men were 
 restricted at every point of the spiritual life. This, 
 as before, was the curse of the world. Love was now 
 cabined, cribbed, confined. Fear, oppression, slavery 
 were its masters. The fear of God replaced the 
 love of God, and He was made by the wicked makers 
 of these restraints jealous, angry, unforgiving, an 
 irresponsible judge, anything but a father. Love 
 was thus destroyed in men, and faith perished along 
 with love. And immediately superstition, which 
 is fear and ignorance of God, was born again in 
 humanity after Jesus had slain it. The spirit of 
 life in religion, which is the spirit of love, was now 
 subjected by a priestcraft which called itself Chris- 
 tianity to an outward law again, and crushed by 
 
54 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 It. There were those who yielded to its evil power, 
 and they were degraded Into a slavery of the reason 
 and the soul. There were those who resisted and 
 denied this evil power, who abjured the law and set 
 up love as their king, who proclaimed forgiveness 
 as God's justice, who made no restriction on the 
 way In which men thought and felt about religious 
 truth, who let faith and love create with freedom 
 their own forms and their own ritual. These were 
 the martyrs of the sorrowful earth ; driven by 
 priests, churches and sects out of a world which 
 was not worthy of them, slain In torment, made to 
 walk with lions. In a terrible poem Blake embodies 
 this view. It Is too long to quote, but its title is 
 A Little Boy Lost. 
 
 He lived till he was near seventy. He was 
 always poor, always unfamed, and always happy. 
 There is a story of a beautiful lady who was one 
 day brought to see him. He looked at her and 
 said, ' May God make this world, my child, as 
 beautiful to you as It has been to me.' Thus, 
 formed of love and joy, his constant life was Praise 
 of God. ^ What,' he said once, and It reminds us 
 of a phrase of Handel's, * what, when the sun rises, 
 do you see ? A round disc of fire, something like 
 a guinea ! O no, no, I see an Innumerable company 
 of the heavenly host crying — 
 
 Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.' 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 This essay will treat, first, of the relation of the 
 poetry of Scott to the time in which he lived, then 
 of the poetry itself, and lastly, of its relation to the 
 previous Scottish poetry. But before I come to 
 these things I will draw attention to the most 
 remarkable power of his poetry ; its power of 
 kindling romantic feeling for the past, that romantic 
 feeling which is mingled of love, reverence, and 
 wonder — love of the beauty of the past in splendour 
 of pageant and procession and dress and buildings, 
 in battle and battle array, in religion and art ; 
 reverence for its noble deeds and sacrifices, its 
 chivalrous adventures for love or honour, its spirit 
 of high courage and faithfulness in war and peace, 
 its contempt for a base or a material life, its care- 
 lessness of wealth and of pain and death when com- 
 pared with honour ; its quick, frank, and noble 
 passions, out of which natural poetry continually 
 arose ; its ideal of the knightly spirit ; its open-handed 
 expenditure of time and money, without ignoble 
 restriction, for the sake of love, for the sake of 
 beauty, for the sake of the future, and for the sake 
 of the state and religion ; and, finally, wonder for 
 
 65 
 
56 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 its mysteries of thought and feeling, in love, in 
 superstition, in legend, in transmuted myths of 
 nature, in the wild tales of the wild creatures of 
 moor and mountain lands and wood, in the imagina- 
 tions of faery and of the far-off islands where dwelt 
 the ever-living in peace and joy. Nor can I omit 
 those strange and often noble aspirations towards 
 the wonders of the unknown, out of which grew 
 the magic, alchemy, and astrology of the Middle 
 Ages. This it is which, in all its forms, Scott's 
 poetry has the power to kindle, and the power has 
 blest and adorned the life of humanity. Its more 
 particular result was the clothing of ancient places 
 belonging to his own country with a robe of 
 romance which will never wear out as long as the 
 English language lasts ; and the support and cherish- 
 ing of this romance in the mind of men, and 
 in the soul of the young. 
 
 As to the first, its power was based on a great 
 knowledge of the history of his native land, on a 
 personal exploration of the border lands of England 
 and Scotland and of the border between the Lowlands 
 and the Highlands. He had walked over all this 
 wild country and studied its natural scenery, its 
 farmers, its ruder indwellers, its ruined peels and 
 castles, its tales of war and passions, its legends and 
 its songs. Nothing escaped that observant eye or 
 deserted that accurate memory. And he did this 
 work and retained its results with a rare intensity of 
 love for it and for the land of his birth which, living, 
 in a prolific and creative imagination, itself thrilled 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 57 
 
 always with wonder and delight, made every valley, 
 stream, mountain, woodland, lake, farmhouse, castle, 
 abbey, village, and town so romantic to him that he 
 clothed them with romance for others. The whole 
 land became alive, walked and warred, thought and 
 felt with passion, spoke and sang. The very names 
 take personality, and breathe and live, and his use of 
 them In poetry Is one of the most brilliant things in 
 literature. 
 
 This was a great result to accomplish, and it 
 acted with extraordinary force on the readers of his 
 poetry. It filled them with a strong desire to see 
 and know the country in which so much romance 
 of the past, of men and landscape, still existed. It 
 opened out the land to eager voyaging, and created 
 the eagerness to visit it. It brought romance home 
 to the hearts of men and women and balanced 
 the materialism of the age. And when once this 
 romantic love was awakened for Scotland, it stirred 
 men to feel it for their own land, for its scenery and 
 history, and for all its past. Englishmen trained 
 on Scott felt quickly the romance of Canterbury, 
 Windsor, Plymouth, of the villages and scenery of 
 Somerset, of Yorkshire, of Warwick. Then they 
 applied the new elements in their soul to foreign 
 landsj and in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany 
 made the places they visited as alive as Scott had 
 made the Lowland and the Highland border. 
 
 In all this cherishing of romance In the minds of 
 men, and especially of the young, the work he did 
 was beautiful; and it continues, and will continue, to 
 
58 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 exercise its power. I am sorry for the children who 
 are not brought up on the poetry of Scott. It is an 
 excellent foundation for the appreciation and love of 
 all other poetry ; it lays up in the minds of those 
 who care for it elements of enchanting pleasure in 
 after-life. 
 
 My father waked us every morning with 
 snatches from the Lay^ from Marmion^ and the Lady 
 of the Lake^ and the day was haunted with their 
 charm. We learnt for ourselves more than half of 
 the poems. Wherever we played, or walked on 
 the hills or by the sea, Scott taught us to build 
 up tales of war and love around the names and 
 scenery of the places, and to fill them with romantic 
 adventures. The first expedition I made after I 
 was twenty-one was made with my brother to Loch 
 Katrine and the Trosachs, to Glenfinlas and Stirling, 
 and it was one long ravishment ; nor did I enjoy 
 Wordsworth, who was then my companion, the less, 
 but the more, because I was living every step of the 
 way with Scott. Many years afterwards, when years 
 of London life had, as I thought, lessened the 
 romantic wonder, I went north and found myself in 
 the early morning looking from a height over a castle 
 famed in Border minstrelsy, and beyond it lay the 
 Solway and its hills, Lanercost, Askerten, Bewcastle, 
 Liddesdale, Teviot and Eskdale, and on the right the 
 ridges of the Roman Wall, the valleys, the rolling rig 
 and flow of the Border mosses and the Border hills. 
 There was scarcely a single name of river, mountain 
 or sea-estuary, castle or farmhouse, which was not 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 59 
 
 known to me from the poetry of Scott. I leaned 
 over the gate and looked long upon the poetic land, 
 and it seemed as if all the dew of youth fell upon 
 me again, as if I were again in the ancient world 
 of adventure, romance, love and war, which we 
 have replaced by science and philosophy, trade and 
 misery, luxury and poverty. But it was to Scott I 
 owed the pre-eminent pleasure of that hour, an hour 
 the impression of which I kept like a precious jewel, 
 and which I have never lost. 
 
 This is the power of Scott, and this a result 
 of his work. Every boy and girl who reads him 
 with love feels the same, every man and woman 
 who has read him with love has a similar experi- 
 ence. It is a great power and a great result, far 
 more important than those imagine who, limiting 
 themselves to the poetry of thought alone, are 
 apart from the romance of the past, and from the 
 freshening spirit it brings to an over-curious, over- 
 wearied, over-peopled life. To be the voice and the 
 inspirer of the young and of their romance ; to have 
 their praise, which is contained in their pleasure, 
 from age to age ; to be the kindler of their first 
 joy, in nature, in ancient historic places, in the story- 
 telling of wild love and sorrow ; to establish that 
 pleasure, so that in after-years they carry with them 
 the power to make all lands romantic ; to nourish 
 into strength and passion the romantic heart — this is 
 Scott's enduring fame as a poet. It is a just fame, 
 worth a man's life, and it is the final criticism of 
 his place as a poet for humanity. 
 
6o STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Deep in the general heart of man 
 J His power survives. 
 
 Having said this, we may now say that the range 
 of his poetry was closely limited. He did not think 
 much of his own poetry ; he thought too little of 
 it. He felt it was careless, flowing unrestrained, 
 inaccurate in rhyme, frequently unimpassioned, 
 sometimes made to order, without any depth of 
 thought. And these things are often true of it. 
 He stands far behind Wordsworth, Keats, or 
 Shelley. His truest genius belongs to prose. But 
 his three first narrative poems are brilliant things, 
 and I have dwelt on their romantic power. The 
 rest of them are more or less manufactured. 
 
 He was greatest in his lyrics. Many of them 
 are poor in quality, curiously careless, curiously un- 
 inspired. Others are brilliant with martial fervour, 
 with the gladness of battle, with the cavalier spirit. 
 Others are full of the woodland spirit, of the 
 morning hunting, of the joy of waking into a new 
 day. And some are of an exquisite tenderness, 
 solemnity, evening sadness, and spiritual beauty, so 
 fine, so delicate, even so subtle in feeling, that they 
 place him for the moment side by side with the 
 great poets. Even when he gave up poetry as a 
 portion of the work of his life, he continued in his 
 novels to write now and then lyrics of this noble 
 kind. The most perfect of them, the ballad of 
 Proud Maisie^ is in the Heart of Midlothian^ and 
 County Guy, lovely with its atmosphere of the 
 eternal romance of evening and of love, comes from 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 6i 
 
 Qjientin Durward, But these belong to the rapid 
 asides of men of genius, and I will not dwell upon 
 them in this place. Scott's main poetic work was 
 that of narrative poetry, and of narrative limited 
 to one type. Tiixie has settled the limits of their 
 poetic genius ; and no one, as I have said, 
 understood those limits better than Scott himself. 
 When he had finished his first three poems, the 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel^ Marmioriy and the Lady 
 of the Lake^ he knew that he had got all the 
 best ore out of this vein, and that there was, 
 apart from his lyrics, only this one vein. He 
 followed these first poems with Rokeby^ the Lord of 
 the Isles^ and the Bridal of Triermain^ all in the same 
 class, but they were done not for their own sake, but 
 rather with the express purpose of getting money 
 to build and settle his house. They bear the mark 
 of effort. The old lightness of touch, the gallop 
 over the moors of poetry, if I may use such a meta- 
 phor, the natural drifting of the narrative, the swift, 
 passionate, and clear view of nature, the romantic 
 childlikeness of the work, are all wearied. And he 
 practically left poetry behind in 1814, when he 
 found the first chapter of Waverley in a drawer 
 of his table, and, finishing the book, began a new 
 career and a greater fame. 
 
 That date, or better, perhaps, 18 15, may be said 
 to close the poetic life of Scott. Don Roderick^ 
 'Triermain^ Rokeby were published before 1814 ; the 
 Lord of the Isles appeared in 18 15. The date 
 enshrines a remarkable coincidence. It marks the 
 
62 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 passing away of the poetry which was influenced 
 so largely by the outbreak of the French Revolu- 
 tion. When the ideas of the Revolution appeared 
 again in the poetry of Shelley and Byron, they 
 clothed themselves in other garments than those 
 they wore in the poetry of Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge. These men, with various power and 
 depth, represented in their earlier poems the 
 enthusiasm belonging to those ideas ; then in later 
 poems the reaction from them ; then the indigna- 
 tion which the false and treacherous form into 
 which Napoleon threw them awakened ; then the 
 sympathy with which the struggle of England 
 for liberty against Napoleon was received by the 
 world ; then the exhaustion when the struggle was 
 over, in which exhaustion poetry ceased to be 
 moved by any public interest or public emotion 
 in the present, and turned either to the past or 
 to the daily human life of the passions for its 
 subjects. That decay of the revolutionary impulse 
 reached its nadir in 1814 and 18 15. The battle 
 of Waterloo is not only an historical, it is a poetic 
 date. 
 
 Scott represents the reverse side of the revolu- 
 tionary impulse, and his representation of it in 
 poetry came also to a close in 18 14 and 1815. 
 The fall of the Bastille in 1789 was the fall of the 
 old regime, and it awoke no enthusiasm in Scott. 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge celebrated it with rap- 
 ture. The new life it seemed to promise for man- 
 kind they sung with triumph and joy. In all their 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 63 
 
 poems of that time there is no trace of any love of 
 the past ; every glance is fixed on the future. But 
 exactly the opposite is the position of Scott. He 
 felt the new impulse, heard the new cry ringing in 
 his ears ; and he, the Jacobite, the adorer of the 
 old, who loved an adventure of Bruce more than 
 the overthrow of the Bastille, whose spirit lived in 
 the ancient while his body moved in the modern 
 world, saw in the fresh movement of humanity 
 that which would destroy all he loved, and set up 
 all he hated because it spoiled what he loved. 
 Therefore, with that unconscious working of genius 
 towards the defence of what is greatly loved, and 
 towards its beautifying in order that others may 
 love it, he set forth in 1802 the volumes of the 
 Border Minstrelsy, in which he had collected, re- 
 vised, or rewritten the ballads ; restored the scenery, 
 the manners, the adventures, the life and passions of 
 the time that filled his thought and his aifection. 
 Perhaps, he thought, I may stem the tide which is 
 setting towards the new ; at least, I may gather under 
 my wing all those who love and cherish the past. If 
 it is to vanish away for ever, we shall together mourn 
 its fate. Then followed, in support of the same 
 protest, the Lay of the Last Minstrel^ and the very 
 title suggests the position which Scott assumed. The 
 minstrel's harp was his ' sole remaining joy.' * His 
 withered cheek and tresses gray Seemed to have 
 known a better day.' 
 
 The last of all the Bards was he, 
 Who sung of Border chivalry ; 
 
64 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 For, well-a-day ! their date was fled, 
 His tuneful brethren all were dead ; 
 And he, neglected and oppressed, 
 Wish'd to be with them, and at rest. 
 
 It may be that Scott thought in 1805, when this 
 poem was published, of his own position as a poet 
 in the midst of a world which, in the passion of a 
 mighty change in the present, ignored or despised 
 the past it had overthrown, and sketched himself in 
 the Minstrel. I am sure that the description of the 
 revival of the minstrel's spirit when he heard the 
 long-forgotten melody of his youth, is the descrip- 
 tion of the temper of his own soul. 
 
 But when he caught the measure wild 
 The old man raised his face, and smiled ; 
 And lightened up his faded eye 
 With all a poet's ecstasy ! 
 In varying cadence, soft or strong. 
 He swept the sounding chords along : 
 The present scene, the future lot. 
 His toils, his wants, were all forgot ; 
 Cold diffidence, and age's frost. 
 In the full tide of song were lost ; 
 Each blank, in faithless memory void, 
 The poet's glowing thought supplied : 
 And while his harp responsive rung, 
 'Twas thus the latest Minstrel sung. 
 
 It pleased him, no doubt, that the success of the 
 poem was so great. That success fell in with the 
 reaction against the Terror, with the horror the 
 aristocracy, the church, the landowners, the wealthy, 
 felt for the overthrow of all the privileges which 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 65 
 
 God Himself, they believed, had conferred on them. 
 The ^ cultivated ' people, hating the baser sort who 
 had risen to the top in the Revolution, and for- 
 getting the vast villainies of the ^ gentlemen ' of 
 France, went back in their judgments to the times 
 of chivalry, and cried that the high-hearted romantic 
 past was better than this base and cruel present. 
 Even those who clung to the new ideas, while they 
 repudiated the form given to them by France, had 
 pleasure in seeing the picture of the past in poetry. 
 To make this impression deeper, Scott wrote Mar- 
 mion in 1808, and the Lady of the Lake in 18 10. 
 The former raised his reputation. It was a better 
 poem than the Lay ; but it did not make the past 
 so delightful as its predecessor, nor exercise the 
 same power over the chivalric imagination. It was 
 not so romantic, and the character of Marmion was 
 ignoble. He ill represented chivalry. 
 
 The Lady of the Lake^ on the other hand, made 
 thrill with romance a whole land, whose memories 
 were of the past, whose Highland indwellers seemed 
 to belong to a time more remote than that of 
 James iv. ; and so charmed the world, that it 
 opened up the lower Highlands and their history to 
 the pilgrimage and the imagination of all English- 
 speaking peoples. Yet, even as Scott began the 
 poem, he felt that the power he had was only suf- 
 ficient to carry him through it on an equal wing. 
 In spite of the poem's immense success, he under- 
 stood in his secret soul that this kind of romantic 
 poetry was apart from the general movement of 
 
66 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 mankind, and that it must pass away. His force 
 had made the beautiful dead alive, but the time 
 was near at hand when it must be buried ; and one 
 of the verses which preface the Lady of the Lake 
 will prove this sufficiently. He is speaking to the 
 Minstrel Harp, whose burden of old was knight- 
 hood's dauntless deed and beauty's matchless eye. 
 
 O wake once more ! how rude soe'er the hand 
 
 That ventures o'er thy magic maze to stray ; 
 O wake once more ! though scarce my skill command 
 
 Some feeble echoing of thine earlier lay : 
 Though harsh and faint, and soon to die away, 
 
 And all unworthy of thy nobler strain. 
 Yet if one heart throb higher at its sway. 
 
 The wizard note has not been touched in vain. 
 Then silent be no more ! Enchantress, wake again ! 
 
 With force of fire and charm he struck this harp ; 
 but never again did the strings emit the same 
 natural and noble sound. The exhaustion which fell 
 upon the other poets after their excitement against 
 the past and for the present fell on him after his 
 excitement for the past against the present. The 
 reasons why both were tired were different, but the 
 result was the same ; and Waterloo marks the final 
 date. 
 
 Afterwards a new form of the old impulse was 
 represented by Byron and Shelley and others, but 
 the first poetic warriors who sprang to their feet 
 at the fall of the Bastille, and fought for or against 
 the idea it crystallised, retired finally from that 
 battle, and either took up other themes or gave 
 up writing poetry altogether. Scott did the latter 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 67 
 
 thing, and he records his exhaustion, and his con- 
 sciousness of the exhaustion of others, in verses 
 scattered among his inferior poems. He speaks of 
 himself and his brother bards, in 1 8 1 1 , as weak 
 minstrels of a laggard day, timid and raptureless, a 
 faint degenerate band, and the phrases mark how 
 deeply he felt the apathy of imagination which had 
 now invaded England.^ 
 
 It is true he also, like the other poets, threw him- 
 self with all the excitement he could muster into 
 the struggle which preceded Waterloo. * Who that 
 ever shared them,' he says, ^ shall forget 
 
 The emotions of the spirit-rousing time ! ' 2 
 
 It is true he writes with studied praise of Pitt, of 
 Nelson, even of Fox, of those who fought in the 
 great war, of Brunswick, of Sidney Smith, of Aber- 
 cromby, of Wellington, of all who fell at Waterloo, 
 of the whole brave fight, maintained well through 
 good report and ill in his country's cause — 
 
 In thy just cause and in thy native might, 
 And in heaven's grace and justice constant still; 
 
 1 Here is the passage : 
 
 But we, weak minstrels of a laggard day, 
 
 Skiird but to imitate an elder page. 
 Timid and raptureless, can we repay 
 
 The debt thou claim'st In this degenerate age ? 
 Thou giv'st our lyres a theme that might engage 
 
 Those that could send thy name o'er sea and land. 
 While sea and land shall last 5 for Homer's rage 
 
 A theme j a theme for Milton's mighty hand — 
 How much unmeet for us, a faint degenerate band ! 
 
 2 Lord of the Isles, canto sixth, i. 
 
68 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 but the strange thing is, that even in this he has no 
 real fire. He writes with no passion ; the poetry is 
 powerless. Wordsworth, who had been set on flame 
 by the Revolution, carried his fire into his poetry 
 against Napoleon and for the fight of England with 
 Napoleon. The present and its living excitement 
 had entered into him. Scott could not even — his 
 fire as a poet was so entirely lit from the past — be 
 kindled by the glory and sacrifice of the war in the 
 Peninsula into poetry worthy of the theme. Of 
 course, as a citizen he was greatly stirred by the 
 war and England's victory, but not as a poet. It 
 is almost absurd to read his patriotic strains con- 
 cerning the events of his own time, so cold, so 
 faded are they, so entirely different from those with 
 which he celebrates the ride of Deloraine, the battle 
 of Flodden, or the games at Stirling. He was not 
 of the world in which he was born — as long as he 
 wrote poetry. 
 
 Hence the prevailing temper of his poetry is 
 sadness. Ruskin says he was sad, and alleges that 
 the age was sad, and Scott, representing it, became 
 sad. But the age, though it became sad (to the 
 poets, not to the nation) in 1 8 1 5, was not at all sad 
 among the poets in 1790, in 1800, in 18 10, when 
 Scott was young. Much of the sadness in his 
 poetry is no doubt due to his early love dis- 
 appointment. It coloured his whole life. But there 
 is a general sadness for which this does not account, 
 a sadness which is like a veil over all his poetry. 
 And the real truth is that, as a poet, it was his 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 69 
 
 apartness from the fresh movements of his age that 
 made him sad. A man cannot write poetry away 
 from the main drift of his time without feeling — 
 if he have the poet's sympathy with humanity — his 
 isolation, and the more sympathy he possesses the 
 more he feels his isolation to be sorrowful. The age 
 was not sad, as an age, save among the poor, whom 
 the war reduced to utter misery ; but their cries did 
 not reach the ear of Scott. The age was either eagerly 
 republican, eagerly patriotic, or eagerly materialist, 
 and, as the last conquered in the end, the age be- 
 came not sad, but contentedly apathetic to ideas, to 
 anything but peace and pride and a full purse. No, 
 Scott's sadness was the sadness of one who had no 
 sympathy for the present, who loved the past and 
 who saw that the past was ruined. That was the 
 true root, as it was the true reason that his poetic 
 power was soon exhausted. He had but one 
 source of poetic emotion, and the source of that 
 emotion was long since dead. To continue mourning 
 over a tomb, and worshipping the relics in it kills 
 at last passion, intelligence, and power. The world, 
 listening to the wailing voice, is wearied, and finally 
 the mourner himself. Scott was tired ; and turned, 
 in his desire to be in touch with a living humanity, 
 to paint in his novels the feelings, the humour, 
 the daily life of the Scottish people, of the rich and 
 learned and poor that surrounded him ; and he did 
 this even in the novels which treated of the past. 
 The novels are not sad, save at just intervals. In 
 them he found his true power, his true joy, and his 
 
70 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 true theme, like Wordsworth, in the eternal present 
 of the human heart. 
 
 There is frequently in the poems, but by no 
 means always in the prose, a sadness in his descrip- 
 tions of the ruins of abbey and castle and famous 
 scenes which, when he wrote, were desolate. He is 
 filled with regret for the vanished splendour, the 
 forgotten deeds, the long exhausted wars, the great 
 I fighters who contend no more, the mouldered world 
 I of chivalry. Turner, the painter, often expressed 
 fthe same sadness. Ruskin seemed to think that 
 Turner was always sad when he painted places 
 filled with the memories of the past. It is by no 
 means always so, nor is it so always in the novels 
 of Scott. But Turner did often set over shattered 
 castle, desecrated abbey, ruined town, the scarlet 
 clouds of storm, the sad and peaceful sympathy of 
 the sunset, the calm white silence of a regretful 
 dawn. On the other hand, like Scott, he was often 
 just as joyful of heart. No man has ever painted 
 with a fuller rapture the leaping passion of sunrise ; 
 or the glory of the sky above a landscape where, in 
 la great battle, liberty has been won. He painted the 
 spirit of the place, now sad, now serene, now happy. 
 For example, Scott's description of Norham, even in 
 its glory, sets it in the fading light of sunset. We 
 hear the sorrow in the tone of the verse. If we wish 
 to see it expressed in another art, and in harmony 
 with the deep regret of Scott, we have only to look 
 at every drawing which Turner did of Norham. 
 Some of them are of sunrise over the castle, but the 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 71 
 
 glory of the sunrise in them only enhances the 
 sorrow of the broken and ruined keep. One is of 
 sunset, and though the castle is in a golden light, 
 the river, swirling by the rock in darkening curves, 
 is tragic with the purple of Tintoret. Turner, 
 like Scott at Crichtoun Castle, in that inimitable 
 phrase, had heard the streams of Tweed ^repine.' 
 And the poetry of Scott, whenever he binds upj 
 natural scenery with human life, is sad with Turner.; 
 The loveliest lines he writes are of nature in the 
 evening hour, and he almost invariably passes from \ 
 it into sorrow, or the memory of sorrow, or the- 
 presentiment of it. The end of County Guy is, 
 * Where is County Guy ? ' The end of ' The sun 
 upon the lake is low ' is ^ Leonard tarries long,' 
 and the fall of the verse in those perfect pictures 
 of evening always suggests to me a prophecy of 
 trouble. 
 
 Of the songs which have to do with human life 
 some are gay enough, but the best are songs of 
 sorrow ; of the tragic fates that smite the young, 
 the beautiful, the proud. Rosabelle perishes in the 
 storm. Maisie, the proud lady, hears her own knell. 
 The Maid of Neidpath's heart is broken. The true 
 lover dies far from his sweetheart ; the false lover 
 dies in the bloody battle. The light lover rides 
 away and leaves the girl to weep ; and the ballads 
 that bear this tragic burden, like The Eve of St. 
 John^ are the best. The closing verses to the Lady 
 of the Lake pass from the quietude of the darkening 
 hills, and the deer seeking covert, and the piping of 
 
72 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 the herd-boy to the twilight, to the remembrance 
 of the dreadful pain of life — ' the secret woes the 
 world has never known/ 
 
 When on the weary night dawned wearier day, 
 And bitterer was the grief devoured alone. 
 
 Even in his youth, as he looked back upon nature, 
 there is this sorrowful note : 
 
 Blackford ! on whose uncultured breast, 
 Among the broom, and thorn, and whin, 
 A truant-boy, I sought the nest, 
 Or listed, as I lay at rest, 
 
 While rose, on breezes thin, 
 The murmur of the city crowd, 
 And, from his steeple jangling loud, 
 
 St. Giles's mingling din. 
 Now, from the summit to the plain. 
 Waves all the hill with yellow grain ; 
 And o'er the landscape as I look, 
 Nought do I see unchanged remain, 
 Save the rude cliffs and chiming brook. 
 
 To me they make a heavy moan. 
 
 Of early friendships past and gone. 
 
 This was written in 1 808. The note is still more 
 unhappy in 18 17, when of the poetic impulse little 
 remained but a few lyrics. This which I quote is 
 perhaps the most personal of Sir Walter's poems ; 
 and its beauty is great. 
 
 The sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill, 
 
 In Ettrick's vale, is sinking sweet ; 
 The westland wind is hush and still, 
 
 The lake lies sleeping at my feet. 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 73 
 
 Yet not the landscape to mine eye 
 
 Bears those bright hues that once it bore ; 
 
 Though evening, with her richest dye, 
 Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick's shore. 
 
 With listless look along the plain, 
 
 I see Tweed's silver current glide. 
 And coldly mark the holy fane 
 
 Of Melrose rise in ruin'd pride. 
 The quiet lake, the balmy air. 
 
 The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree, — 
 Are they still such as once they were ? 
 
 Or is the dreary change in me ? 
 
 The sadness, as I have said, of this poem is mainly 
 personal, and momentary. Yet it falls in with that 
 general note in his poetry, the melancholy of which 
 I trace to the feeling underlying his poetic work 
 that the past he loved was out of harmony with 
 the present ; that he himself in his poetry was apart 
 from his age and the hopes of men in it. 
 
 Ruskin's view is the exact opposite of this. His 
 statement that Scott represented the sadness of the 
 age ought to prevent our ever finding Scott happy 
 in man or nature, but we know that this sadness, for 
 the most part, disappeared in his novels when he 
 did get into close union with the human life of his 
 country. Moreover, it disappears when in his poetry 
 he is with nature, quite alone and apart from man ; 
 or when he is excited by hunting or by the wild war 
 and triumph of the Highlander. Even Ruskin 
 allows Scott's joy in the natural world, nay, he in- 
 sists upon it. When Scott lost himself in absolute 
 enjoyment of nature he lost the sense of his apart- 
 
74 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 ness from his age. In that he was not divided 
 from the other poets. Deep pleasure in nature for 
 her own sake was now universal in poetry. And 
 when Scott had forgotten those elements in the 
 modern world which he hated, and felt when as a 
 child he read his first ballads ; when he found 
 himself in a place like the Trosachs, untrodden 
 even by the foot of the shepherd, he flung himself 
 into rejoicing, delightful, rich and keen description 
 — frankly objective, never subjective, never weighted 
 or involved with thought, always of the visible, 
 never of the invisible beneath the visible, never of 
 the spiritual underlying the material. Solitude made 
 him happy, and, afar from men, his muse drew near 
 to him, and then she smiled. * My muse,* he says, 
 * will seldom wake, 
 
 Save by dim wood and silent lake ; 
 She is the wild and rustic Maid, 
 Whose foot unsandall'd loves to tread 
 Where the soft greensward is inlaid 
 
 With varied moss and thyme; 
 And, lest the simple lily-braid, 
 That coronets her temples, fade, 
 She hides her still in greenwood shade, 
 
 To meditate her rhyme. 
 And now she comes ! The murmur dear 
 Of the wild brook hath caught her ear, 
 
 The glade hath won her eye ; 
 She longs to join with each blithe rill 
 That dances down the Highland hill 
 
 Her blither melody.' 
 
 Now, this enjoyment of pure nature was part of 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 75 
 
 the poetic movement of Scott's time, and part of 
 the ideas out of which grew the Revolution. So 
 far, then, we may say that he was in harmony with 
 the forward ideas of his time, and to this partial 
 union of his with the new thoughts of men I may, 
 I think, partly trace the absence of sadness in his 
 poetry of nature when he wrote of her for her own 
 sake only, and without bringing human associations 
 into the impressions she made upon him. But the 
 joy he had then in pure nature was not long-lived. 
 He needed to associate her beauty with the soul and 
 the works of man.^ That also we come to need, 
 but we, taught by such men as Wordsworth, asso- 
 ciate it with the human interests of the present as 
 well as with the history of the past. Scott left out 
 the present in his poetry. He did not bind up 
 nature with humanity as it moved excitedly forward 
 
 1 *The romantic feelings which I have described as predominating in 
 my mind gradually rested upon, and associated themselves with, the 
 grand features of the landscape around me ; and the historical incidents 
 or traditional legends connected with many of them gave to my ad- 
 miration a sort of intense impression of reverence which at times made 
 my heart feel too big for its bosom. From this time the love of natural 
 beauty, more especially when combined with ancient ruins, or remains 
 of our fathers' piety or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion 
 which I would willingly have gratified by travelling over half the 
 globe.' 
 
 The same thought is touched more gracefully in the epilogue to the 
 Bridal of Triermain : 
 
 But, Lucy, we will love them yet, 
 The mountain's misty coronet, 
 
 The greenwood, and the wold 5 
 And love the more, that of their maze 
 Adventure high of other days 
 
 By ancient bards is told. 
 
76 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 in his own time, but only with humanity as it 
 moved eagerly in the past. And then, of course, 
 his nature poetry became sad. 
 
 I may perhaps be permitted to expand this par- 
 ticular statement further. Scott, with his peculiar 
 hatred of the new ideas concerning man, and his 
 retreat to the past because of that hatred, was in 
 
 ' a confused and ill-fortuned position. He, like the 
 rest of the world of his time, had gained from 
 the ideas which preceded the French Revolution 
 the love of wild and solitary nature ; the feeling that 
 we should find in her an answer to our trouble, a 
 source from whom we might draw lessons of sim- 
 
 . plicity of feeling, of pure sentiment unmixed with 
 wrong, of greater nearness to the heart and life 
 of the universe ; the belief that in such communion 
 we should find both peace and joy. This was one 
 of the ideas which filled many French and English 
 writers before 1789. It was everywhere afloat. 
 The fury of the Revolution blotted it out for a 
 time, but it belonged to its original ideas ; and it 
 grew steadily and naturally, uninterrupted by violent 
 political storm, among the English poets. In them 
 it was slowly harmonised with the overthrow of the 
 past system of society and the prophecy of a new 
 system ; and in them, on the whole, there is, after 
 Young, less and less sadness, and more and more 
 of a sacred and noble joy in the study of nature. 
 When the progress of this thought had reached 
 Wordsworth, nature is loved for herself alone, and 
 the past, or regrets for it, rarely intrude into the 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 77 
 
 poetry which delights in her. And, finally, when 
 humanity is introduced into natural description, it 
 is chiefly the humanity of the present, not of the 
 past, the simple humanity of the poor whose lives 
 and passions the ideas of the Revolution ennobled 
 and sanctified. 
 
 Scott, on the other hand, mixed up with the idea 
 of the new time concerning nature other thoughts 
 which belonged to the old time ; he imposed on the 
 solitudes of nature and on her loveliness, seen now 
 in the wild freshness the freed spirit of man con- 
 ferred on her, regrets for a vanished glory. When 
 he lived with Nature he was a child of the new 
 spirit, but he combined with that spirit a worship 
 of the spirit of the past. Naturally, the two did 
 not fit or mingle into harmony. The two elements, 
 one drawn from the living present, the other drawn 
 from the dead past, produced in his mind a con- 
 fusion of feeling, and made him sorrowful as a poet. 
 
 We have not this confusion. We can mingle 
 pleasure in the memory of a romantic past with 
 pleasure in nature. But then we are not, as Scott 
 was, in the centre of the battle. The battle is 
 decided. We love the romantic side of the past, 
 but we do not regret it. We are content with its 
 death, we do not wish to bring it back again. Our 
 feeling, then, is unmixed with questioning, with any 
 doubt of itself. The river on which we sail when 
 we live with nature ought to be a free and happy 
 stream, unless we are fools enough to gather over 
 its waters the troubles of our inner life. 
 
78 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 As the years went on, and Scott took up in prose 
 the work he had begun with poetry ; as the wrath 
 he felt at the Revolution lessened with its over- 
 throw ; as England seemed, after Waterloo, to bring 
 back the ideas of the past — his sadness was turned 
 into quiet, and pleasure with the course of things ; 
 and his novels have lost the sadness of his poetry. 
 No life then could have been more justly happy 
 than his, and it may not be apart from this portion 
 of my essay to close it with the words which 
 Wordsworth wrote of Sir Walter when last they 
 met, before the great creator went to Italy to seek 
 the health Tweed and all her hills could not afford 
 him. They met and wandered together to Newark, 
 adown the vale and stream of Yarrow ; and Words- 
 worth, like Scott in earlier days, saw sorrow in 
 the loveliness of nature, for him with whom he 
 walked he thought he should see no more. But out 
 of sorrow he rose into a brighter thought ; he saw 
 the sunshine of spirit which had brooded over 
 the great and noble life which Scott had lived. 
 Nature and humanity lived in his work ; all man- 
 kind would be for ever grateful to him. Therefore 
 he said : 
 
 And if, as Yarrow, through the woods, 
 
 And down the meadow ranging, 
 Did meet us with unahered face. 
 
 Though we were changed and changing ; 
 If, then, some natural shadows spread 
 
 Our inward prospect over, 
 The soul's deep valley was not slow 
 
 Its brightness to recover. 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 79 
 
 For thou, upon a hundred streams, 
 
 By tales of love and sorrow. 
 Of faithful love, undaunted truth. 
 
 Hast shed the power of Yarrow ; 
 And streams unknown, hills yet unseen. 
 
 Wherever they invite thee. 
 At parent Nature's grateful call. 
 
 With gladness must requite thee. 
 
 It is not nature only who makes that call for grati- 
 tude, but the heart of man. 
 
 Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue 
 
 Than sceptered king or laurelled conqueror knows 
 
 Follow this wondrous Potentate. 
 
 They follow him still, and will follow him evermore. 
 
 II 
 
 It is well now, before I pass to the hereditary 
 elements in Scott's poetry, to say something more 
 particularly of the poems themselves. No one 
 claims him as one of the greater poets ; and, though 
 the immense success of his poems might have 
 flattered another man into making this claim, it did 
 not for a moment induce Scott to make it. On the 
 contrary, he had too low an opinion of his poetic 
 work, and disparaged it too much. What he liked 
 in it was its unconfined rush, its freedom from 
 artificial rules, its natural wild carelessness — 
 
 wild as cloud, or stream, or gale. 
 Flow on, flow unconfined, my Tale ! 
 
8o STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 He knew he could not do what the loftier poets 
 could do, and he did not try to reach their goal. 
 But all the more, he determined to use frankly 
 the powers he had, and to let them have their bold 
 and happy way. This was his wisdom ; and it is 
 part of his clear-seeing, lovable character, in which 
 there is not one trace of morbid, self-considering, 
 envious or self-deceiving feeling. ' I cannot follow,' 
 he might say, 'or study the great masters. The 
 careful rhyme, regular movement, and stately com- 
 position are not for me ; but I may give pleasure 
 by writing as my nature impels me — 
 
 For me, thus nurtured, dost thou ask 
 The classic poet's well-conned task ? 
 Nay, Erskine, nay — On the wild hill 
 Let the wild heath-bell flourish still ; 
 Cherish the tulip, prune the vine, 
 But freely let the woodbine twine. 
 And leave untrimmed the eglantine : 
 Nay, my friend, nay — Since oft thy praise 
 Hath given fresh vigour to my lays ; 
 Since oft thy judgment could refine 
 My flattened thought, or cumbrous line ; 
 Still kind, as is thy wont, attend. 
 And in the minstrel spare the friend. 
 Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale. 
 Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my Tale ! ' 
 
 It is this animation, impulsive ardour, a freedom as 
 of wild nature herself, this clear vision of all he 
 loved outside of himself and swift expression of it, 
 this delightful naturalness, this joyful freedom, 
 which charm us in his poetry. 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 8i 
 
 I am not sure that the vivacity and variety of 
 Scott's poetry is not as well, perhaps better, repre- 
 sented in the short songs, ballads, and minstrel- 
 pieces as in the long poems. Like the long poems, 
 they do not, save in two or three fateful lyrics, rise 
 into the loftier and graver regions of poetry, but, on 
 their level and within their sphere, they can express 
 with equal power the splendid eagerness of life 
 or its melancholy fates, or, indeed, the quiet region 
 of subdued feeling which exists between youthful 
 ardour and tragic pain. In that quiet region there 
 is nothing better in English lyric than County Guy 
 and The Sun upon the lake is low^ and the little poem 
 entitled The Weirdlaw Hill. They seem to be 
 written by the evening light itself, in its resigned, 
 still, veiled atmosphere ; encompassed by beauty, 
 but by beauty which is passing away. Low and 
 sweet is their music, and behind it, dimly felt, is the 
 inevitable, the unknown trouble which is coming. 
 
 I am sure this was a frequent mood of Scott's 
 inner life. He did not openly speak of this deep- 
 seated element in his temperament which coexisted, 
 as is not uncommon, with a delightful ardour and 
 joy in life, but it haunts his poetry. When it is 
 vaguely, slightly felt, rising like a thin, golden, far- 
 off mist of evening, it subdues the note of the poem, 
 as in County Guy, Where it is more deeply felt 
 and brings with it the dark menace of the tragedy 
 of life, it brings forth lyrics like Rosabelle. 
 
 Soft is the note and sad the lay 
 That mourns the lovely Rosabelle. 
 F 
 
82 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 This is, of its kind, a perfect ballad. As full of 
 wild tragedy is Where shall the lover resty Clare's 
 song in Marmion. The coronach — He is gone on the 
 mountain — is by its nature sad, but how excellent it 
 is ; everything in it is right. The Maid of Neidpath 
 reaches without an effort, with the most natural ease 
 and simplicity, a very depth of sorrow. These are 
 good, but the dark jewel of them all is Proud Maisie^ 
 where the ancient Fate, which slew the Greek who 
 was insolent to the gods and natural law, slays the 
 proud maiden, but slays her not in the Greek, but 
 in the full romantic, world. The snatches of song 
 Madge Wildfire sings in the Heart of Midlothian 
 are not far from the excellence of poor Ophelia's 
 singing, and the Ballad of the Harlaw that Elspeth 
 sings in the Antiquary is the finest reproduction of 
 the spirit of the old ballads which exists in litera- 
 ture. They breathe the wildness of wild sorrow 
 and of wild war. On the other hand, his ardent 
 daring, eager joy, the strong delight of his tempera- 
 ment in open-air life, in the romance of war and 
 hunting, of which, as he roamed the Border, his 
 imagination made him a partaker, filled another 
 .class of his lyrics with rushing music, and often 
 with an outlaw's passion. The martial brilliance 
 and swiftness of Bonny Dundee^ written, they say, 
 in half an hour, cannot be bettered. We ride 
 with the horsemen and gallop with the verse. We 
 drink with the men, hear the shouting, and toss our 
 bonnets in the air. March^ march, Ettrick and Teviot- 
 dale echoes the irregular march of the men in the 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 83 
 
 trampling of the verse. The wild cry of the High- 
 land clans, the gathering, the pipes, the lonely glens 
 whence they came, the mountain moors over which 
 they marched, are seen and heard, as if they were 
 alive, in the Pibroch Donuil Dhu ; and the splendid 
 way in which the ringing names are used in the 
 verse — an excellence which runs through all the 
 poems — gives it colour, resonance, and the full 
 voice of war. The speed of the verse of Toung 
 Lochinvar is not less fit to the subject than the 
 romantic daring and the gallant love which fill the 
 poem as wine fills a cup. In the two songs of 
 Brignall Banks and A weary lot is thine^ fair maid^ 
 the spirit of the outlaw's life lives and breathes 
 through the verse. In one its grim loneliness, its 
 thought-overladen conscience, is represented ; in the 
 other its inconstant thoughtlessness and reckless 
 freedom. And both are deepened by the contrast 
 of the innocent maidens whose youth sings uncon- 
 sciously, before the outlaws, of peace and happy days. 
 To create the right, the fitting atmosphere, is a 
 great excellence, and Scott had this rare power 
 when he was, in his lyrics, at his best. We cannot 
 give a similar praise to the greater number of the 
 lyrics. Some of them are strangely lifeless, others 
 are expressed with a curious artificiality, some are 
 plainly invented for the occasion and written with 
 too little impulse or feeling. There is a pathless 
 gulf between these and the others ; and it is only 
 one proof the more of the artist nature in Scott, 
 that when he was not writing naturally and from 
 
84 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 a truly steadfast, or momentary, emotion, he wrote 
 poorly. 
 
 Another element in Scott's poetry is a flitting 
 fancy for the supernatural, which was nurtured in 
 him by the wild legends of the Border. It appears 
 in the great pleasure with which he collected the 
 stories of the wild indwellers of the moor and the 
 river, and the dark stories of the mountain glens 
 where the pagan spirits still retained power over 
 those who cherished evil thought. 
 
 It appears in the pleasure he evidently took in 
 his imitations of those German ballads which deal 
 with the supernatural, such as Burger's Lenore and 
 Der Wilde Jdger^ and in the ballads he sent to 
 Lewis's ^ales of Wonder, They are well done, but 
 he did the same kind of thing far better when he 
 wrote ballads on stories of his native land. He only 
 breathed easily the air of his own country. There 
 is nothing, save in a few old Border ballads, more 
 weird, more nobly supernatural, than ne Eve 
 of St. John ; nothing more animated than Cadyow 
 Castle ; and Glenfinlas and the Shepherd's Tale^ while 
 less good, are not unworthy of their legends. 
 
 This element was still lively in his mind when he 
 wrote the Lay of the Last Minstrel. He handled it 
 well enough in Deloraine's ride and the opening of 
 the tomb of Michael Scott. But when it comes to 
 the magic of the Lady and to the malicious pranks 
 of the Goblin Dwarf, the result is failure, and Scott 
 gave up the use of supernatural machinery till we 
 find him trying it again in Harold the Dauntless^ and 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 85 
 
 failing even more completely. Only in the *Bridal of 
 "Triermain does he treat a magical story well. There 
 are quaint failures in this poem. The four choirs 
 of maidens in the four halls of the castle are a little 
 chilling, like an unrelated ornament on a well- 
 proportioned building, and are ill-fitted into the 
 actual legend from another tale ; but there is 
 humanity enough in the poem to please and charm ; 
 and in spite of adverse criticism, I confess that I 
 read it again and again with the sincerest pleasure. 
 Even the rococo treatment of the Arthurian part of 
 the subject gives me a certain pleasure, it is so 
 plainly what it is. Moreover, Scott himself, in a 
 certain side-mood of his various mind, is plainly 
 to be felt in the treatment of the poem ; and 
 whatever he is or chooses to be, one is always 
 in love with him when he is writing of what he 
 loves. 
 
 It is because he did not care much for what he 
 was writing that "The Lord of the Isles is so inferior 
 to Tihe Lady of the Lake and its predecessors. He 
 wrote it, as he said, to make money ; he was quite 
 bored by it ; and he was writing Rokeby^ Waverley^ 
 Guy Manneringy and a Life of Swift in the same 
 year. It is scratchy, uninspired, and with a few 
 exceptions, such as genius is sure to make, lifeless 
 labour. His poetic vein was now worked out save 
 for a few lyrics, and then he found himself in prose 
 as he never had found himself in poetry. Few 
 men, having exhausted one rich vein in their nature, 
 find another richer still, and have the power to 
 
86 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 work It. But this man was inexhaustible, a splendid 
 gift of God to men. 
 
 The fame of Scott as a narrative poet rests on 
 the three poems which preceded Rokeby, The Lay 
 of the Last Minstrel is almost formless. It began as 
 a ballad, and it never quite loses the spirit of the 
 ballad. It is most like a congeries of ballads worked 
 together into a continuous poem. But it makes up 
 for this by its extraordinary vigour and by its 
 romantic enchantment. It blew across the dull mist 
 of England's materialism like a wind from the 
 northern sea, and dispersed it for a time. It made 
 men and women believe again in magic, and dwarfs, 
 and the spirits of flood and fell, and romance ; and 
 above all in life lived frankly, boldly, on the edge 
 of danger and delight — individual life, careless of 
 wealth and comfort and death, careful only for 
 honour and loyalty and love. The romantic past 
 opened its gates, and the unromantic folk walked 
 in, and were amazed to find themselves happy in 
 the air of that strange country. The life of the 
 Border, its wars, passions, temper, and faiths, grew 
 into a seeming reality. It was curious and pleasant 
 to read of the strife between the Scotts and the 
 Beattisons for Eskdale, told as if by one who was 
 present at the foray and the battle. Every one who 
 read of the ride of Deloraine rode with him through 
 the night and saw the light from the tomb of 
 Michael Scott break gloriously up to the chancel 
 roof of Melrose, and felt the spear of Cranstoun 
 pierce his breast. Every one saw with his own eyes 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 87 
 
 the English host gather round Branksome Tower, 
 and heard the Border slogan summon the clans. 
 The poem Is alive with war from end to end, and 
 the life of free war entered into the hearts of its 
 readers. And through it all, and making its charm, 
 the spirit of Scott himself ran to and fro in delight, 
 over the moors and rivers, the abbeys and castles, the 
 gatherings, the camps, the tourneys, and the warlike 
 feasts he loved so well. 
 
 Marmion^ published in 1808, three years after the 
 Lay^ was, unlike it, conceived as a whole, and as 
 carefully composed and shaped as Scott could manage. 
 The characters illustrate one another fairly, but in 
 themselves are not interesting. The incidents are 
 no longer haphazard, and enliven or advance the 
 tale ; the hero's fictitious character is linked to a 
 great historical event ; there is plenty of variety and 
 picturesque drawing, and the sequence and shape of 
 the story are clear enough to satisfy the reader. It 
 is true they might be clearer, and the work is often 
 careless with the natural carelessness of Scott. The 
 form of the poem is not then of the best, but the 
 spirit of it is irresistible. Life runs through it like 
 a river ; and when we are in touch with its stirring 
 life, we think but little of its defective form. Its 
 great mistake is that the main character is a traitor 
 to love and to honour for the sake of wealth — a 
 forger and a betrayer ; and though Scott tried hard 
 to balance these sins by painting his bravery, his 
 power to lead, his audacious pride, he could not 
 save him for romance. He died like a hero, but 
 
88 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Douglas would not take his hand. This subtly 
 taints the poem. His enemy Wilton is a mere 
 ghost of a character. He does not count. The 
 rest is excellent. There are few descriptions of 
 nature, and none of her, as afterwards, for her own 
 sake ; but she is described as mingling her beauty 
 with the works of man, with castle and convent, 
 palace and camp. Such descriptions are of a delight- 
 ful vividness, colour, detail, and sentiment. They 
 change their atmosphere in accordance with their 
 subject. The opening description of Norham in 
 the sunset, and of Marmion's approach ; that of the 
 sea-voyage from Whitby to Lindisfarne ; of the 
 camp, of the war array of Scots and English by the 
 Till before the battle closed thick and bloody on 
 Flodden Field, are full of the brightest light, of 
 fresh air and of vivid movement. We not only 
 see the scene, we hear the dashing of the waves, 
 and the horse hoofs on the bridge at Norham, and 
 the trumpet's sounding, the soldiers' shouting in the 
 camp, and the clash of battle. This is an excellent 
 power in a poet — the craft of presentation. It was 
 as good in the description of men, but on that I 
 shall dwell in another part of this essay. 
 
 Marmion was followed by The Lady of the Lake^ 
 which, though I love the Lay the most, is the best 
 composed, the most inventive, and most pleasing of 
 the poems. It moves with ease from start to finish 
 in a flowing narrative. The events follow without 
 a jar from one to another and are naturally linked 
 together. They take place in a narrow belt of 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 89 
 
 country and within a short time. The story is 
 slight, but it is romantic throughout, and though 
 some of the characters are historical, the poem is 
 not worried by history. 
 
 Then it is pure invention from beginning to end 
 — a little romantic adventure, pushed into historical 
 times out of the world of the Chansons de Geste — a 
 hunting, the hunter lost in an unknown country, a 
 solitary island and a mountain maiden of a great 
 house, her lovers and her bard — I need not follow 
 the rest of the story. It is honest, clear invention, 
 healthy expression of the outward world, and none 
 of those subjective feelings which have no reproduc- 
 tive power injure its reality. The story is not one 
 of the great stories, nor does it deal with the move- 
 ments of the greater passions, nor is its action of 
 high moment. Its level is only half-way up Par- 
 nassus. But it was a level on which Scott as a 
 poet moved with a comfortable, productive pleasure, 
 with facile execution. He had the liveliest feeling 
 of the situations he created, and the power to express 
 them happily. Then, too, the scenery in which 
 he placed his story was that of his native land, and 
 his love of Scotland is like a spirit of life in the 
 poem. It is not brought into the same prominence 
 as it is in Marmion or in the Lay^ but it pervades 
 the poem. Moreover the scenery is quite new, and 
 the description of it awoke the greatest interest and 
 excitement in its readers. Scott discovered the 
 Trosachs and opened the Highlands to the pleasure 
 of mankind in The Lady of the Lake. It was not 
 
90 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 only the romantic tale, but also the revelation of an 
 unknown world of wild beauty, which again sent a 
 freshening wind into a dull society. 
 
 The characters in the poem are not worth much. 
 The tale is more than the personages and absorbs 
 them too much. None of them are as clearly 
 defined and painted as the men in Marmion^ but 
 Ellen is more of a reality than Clare. Indeed, it is 
 strange that he who in his novels drew characters so 
 variously, so vitally, should in his poems draw them 
 so weakly, and with so little variety. Their outward 
 presentment, their dress, their air, all that the eye 
 sees, is done with a splendid pencil, but what they 
 were within is vague. The shell is there, but not 
 the kernel. Scott felt this himself, and in Rokeby 
 he deliberately set himself to make the portraiture 
 of character the chief feature of the poem. He 
 succeeded in this effort as ill in Rokeby as he succeeded 
 in it magnificently in his novels. The characters of 
 the poem are over-moralised, somewhat lifeless, and 
 assuredly dull. They do not fit the time of the 
 puritans and cavaliers in which Scott placed them ; 
 that is, they have no historical value. Their poetic 
 value is not great enough to make one careless as 
 to whether they are representative of the time in 
 which they are placed. The natural descriptions, 
 while accurate, are without freshness or inspira- 
 tion. The moral tags with which they often 
 end are distressing, and the preachments and the 
 far - fetched illustrations that deviate so widely 
 from the subject irritate the reader as much as 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 91 
 
 the general dulness of the story. The lyrics are 
 dragged in. 
 
 On the whole, the quick pulse of life which runs 
 through the previous poems, their fresh air and 
 light, their dance of feeling and of metre, their 
 swift incidents and vivid descriptions, are gone in 
 Rokeby. No natural impulse starts it or goes with 
 it. It was done with the purpose of paying for his 
 house and plantations. The purpose necessarily 
 injured the poetry and curdled his imagination. He 
 elaborated its preparation, studied the natural 
 scenery of it with so much care as to lose his first 
 fresh impressions, and, most unfortunately, left in it 
 his native land. These things took from the poem 
 that vivacity, speed, and creative joy which had in 
 its predecessors enchanted a sleepy public. I have 
 often thought as I read them of young Lochinvar's 
 ride. 
 
 She is won ! we are gone, over bank, bush, and scaur, 
 
 They '11 have fleet steeds that follow, quoth young Lochinvar. 
 
 Nothing of that spirit is in Rokeby. 
 
 Lastly, we have no poetry of reflection in Scott. 
 He was not even reflective of himself. There is no 
 personal analysis of his soul, his moods, his woes, or 
 his mental diseases. We never see or smell the 
 lazar-house. The poems are full of the spirit of 
 Scott, but not of descriptions of himself. They are 
 as impersonal, save in one or two instances, as 
 nature herself. Even in the introductions to the 
 several cantos of Marmton^ where he does speak 
 
92 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 of himself, it is such self-speaking as may occur in 
 letters to friends, which these introductions purport 
 to be. They are not self-revelation so much as 
 recalling to his friend the happy memories of their 
 youthful past. The rarity of such personal memories 
 is one of the charms of these poems. We may 
 wish for more of this personal element, but, on the 
 whole, his impersonality in poetry is too great a 
 blessing to be lost in a world which is so over- 
 whelmingly personal in poetry. When we are weary 
 of philosophy in verse, of representations of ex- 
 hausted moods, of the weariness of life in men who 
 imagine they have lived, of what some poets call 
 truth and is disease, of sordid society embodied in 
 flamboyant verse, of jangled rhymes for the sake 
 of clever rhyme, of strange rhythms, of word- 
 painting as if sound and pattern of words were 
 poetry, it is a great comfort to turn to Walter 
 Scott and find oneself in a world of poetry where 
 the verse is simple, straightforward, clear, sweet, 
 and abiding in romance. I am sorry for those 
 who cannot share in this consolation. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In the first part of this essay I have tried to show 
 how the poetry of Scott was related to the ideas of 
 the Revolution. In this last part I should like, if 
 possible, to explain how it is related to the previous 
 Scottish poetry. In doing this certain elements of 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 93 
 
 his poetry will appear on which I have not yet 
 touched. 
 
 There is a distinct race difference in the poetry 
 written in the English tongue by men inhabiting 
 the Lowlands of Scotland from that written in 
 England itself ; and the difference consists in this — 
 that in the Lowlands Celtic blood was equally 
 mixed with English blood, whereas over a great 
 part of England such an admixture was very 
 unequal. It is true that in Devonshire, and along 
 the borders of our Wales, the Welsh mingled with 
 the English, but, even there, not to the same extent 
 as in the Lowlands. In our Yorkshire and our 
 Northumberland there was also a Celtic admixture, 
 but again, not to a similar extent with the Low- 
 lands. On the south of the Border the Teutonic 
 element finally predominated, and absorbed, almost 
 altogether, the Celtic. But on the north of the 
 Border, in the Lowlands, it was quite a different 
 story. The western half of the Lowlands — part of 
 the kingdom of Strathclyde which was unconquered 
 by the English — was entirely Celtic, with the excep- 
 tion of Galloway. The eastern half — part of the 
 old kingdom of Northumbria — from the Border to 
 the river Forth was English. After a time the Scot 
 kings of the west overran the eastern Lowlands, and 
 reduced the English inhabitants under their sway. 
 They did not slaughter or enslave the English, but 
 amalgamated them with their own subjects. The 
 two races, then, mingled on an equality over all the 
 Lowlands, intermarried easily, and their various 
 
94 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 race qualities were combined for centuries. This 
 mingling of race has influenced all Lowland Scottish 
 history and all Lowland Scottish poetry, that is, 
 poetry written south of the Forth and Clyde in the 
 English tongue. We have, then, to remember that 
 in this space of land between the Border and the 
 two rivers of the Clyde and the Forth there was 
 a condition of things which existed nowhere else 
 in Britain. In England the direct Celtic influence 
 disappears from literature. Indirectly, through the 
 Normans, it had a great influence in the story of 
 Arthur. But it was not direct ; it came clothed 
 not in Celtic garments, but in the trappings of 
 French romance. In the Lowlands, where the Celt 
 and the Teuton were for centuries harmoniously 
 mixed together, certain Celtic elements, long un- 
 touched by French romance, acted directly on 
 literature when it began north of the Border, 
 and coloured the English poetry written in the 
 Lowlands from its origin right down to the present 
 day. In Chaucer, these elements derived from the 
 Celtic race have completely disappeared. In James 
 the First of Scotland they clearly exist, even though 
 he was an imitator of Chaucer. In the Lowland 
 poets, though Chaucer's influence was also great 
 with them, they continue to exist. In Henderson, 
 in Dunbar, in Gawain Douglas, in Fergusson, and 
 in Burns, they are prominent. They are just as 
 strongly marked in Walter Scott. 
 
 The first of these Celtic elements is the love of 
 nature for its own sake. In the early poems of 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 95 
 
 Ireland, in the Gaelic poems of Scotland and in those 
 of Wales, there is a close, imaginative, emotional ob- 
 servation and description of natural beauty, especially 
 of wild nature, which is also found in the English 
 poetry of the Lowlands, but not in English poetry 
 proper till the nineteenth century. The poet loves 
 to be alone with nature without even his sweetheart. 
 Quite content with the beauty and joy he feels, he 
 is ravished into description, not of his own feelings, 
 but of the things before his eyes. They are enough, 
 and if he can describe them well, others will be 
 lured to the same solitude with nature and into 
 the same delight. But we may say — This also 
 is to be found in English poetry ! Yes, but in 
 English poetry of the nineteenth century. The 
 point is that it can scarcely be said to exist in the 
 Early English poetry after the Conquest,^ and that 
 at the time, for example, of Henry vii. and Henry 
 VIII., when there was not a trace in England of it, 
 it was in full flower in Scotland. 
 
 In Chaucer's time there was no description of 
 wild nature, of mountain or forest country, no 
 love of it. On the contrary, Chaucer would 
 have been exceedingly put out, even terrified, if 
 he found himself among mountains or in a savage 
 moorland. What he loved was a trim garden 
 with beds of roses and pebbled pathways, or a wood 
 
 1 An exception may be made in the case of Layamon's Brut, and the 
 Grene Knight, where some fine natural description may be found j but 
 Layamon, on the border of Wales, was closely subject to Celtic influence, 
 and so was the writer of the Grene Knight^ who belonged to Lancashire. 
 
96 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 where the trees were planted at proper distances 
 among shaven grass. His landscape was, on the 
 whole, the conventional French landscape, and this 
 was the only kind of nature English poets cared 
 for up to the time of Elizabeth. But in Scotland 
 it was quite different. Even in the Kings ^air — 
 the work of James i. — though the poem imitates 
 Chaucer, the landscape has touches of wildness and 
 is loved for its own sake ; and in the later poets — 
 Henderson, Douglas, Dunbar — the whole scenery 
 of spring, of summer, of winter, the woodland, the 
 rushing brooks, the wild rocks, the mountain glens, 
 the wind among them in its storm, the aspects of 
 the sky — are described with an accuracy, a study, a 
 minute love which at their time was unknown, nay, 
 was impossible in England ; and which, in its full- 
 ness, though it began with James Thomson who 
 brought it from Scotland, we do not find in English 
 poetry, in its absolute ignoring of humanity, until 
 two hundred years after, till Wordsworth began 
 to write. There is, of course, fine natural descrip- 
 tion in the Elizabethan poetry down to Milton ; in 
 Herrick and his comrades, in Gray and Collins, but 
 it is not a poetry for the sake of nature alone ; it is 
 of nature as a background for humanity, as a mirror 
 reflecting human feeling, an image or illustration of 
 human life. But in the Lowland poetry, as it fre- 
 quently is in Wordsworth and our own poets, it is 
 of nature alone for her own sake, apart from men. 
 
 This is the strange thing we have to account 
 for, and I hold that it is due to the long, unbroken 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 97 
 
 admixture of Celtic blood in the Lowland people. 
 Moreover, the description is of a particular kind. 
 What is seen and recorded is seen in itself as it 
 is. The exact scene is so closely given that it reads 
 too much like a catalogue. It wants the spiritual 
 element of the universal Divine that Wordsworth 
 or Coleridge would have added to it. The descrip- 
 tions by Gawain Douglas of summer and winter 
 landscape are minute and loving, but they do not 
 introduce man, they are of nature for her own sake>y 
 They might have been written by James Thomson, 
 and yet their date is at the beginning of the six- 
 teenth century. 
 
 This is the kind of description of nature which 
 we find in Walter Scott. His descriptions are close 
 to the general aspect of the scene, accurate as far as 
 they go, even minute. Humanity does not intrude 
 upon them. They have no spiritual element. They 
 are clear statements of natural fact. That which 
 makes them delightful is that their lucid vision of 
 the beautiful things the poet has the heart to sec 
 reveals his love of them, and of the wild loneliness 
 in which they live. But this natural, unmeditative 
 love is all. Nature to him is not, apart from 
 her forms, in any sense alive. A cloud is a 
 cloud, a stream a stream, a rock a rock. They 
 have no soul, no voice, no consciousness of joy, as 
 they would have to Wordsworth. If he speak of 
 sorrow, or peace, or pleasure in connection with 
 these natural objects, the sorrow, peace, and pleasure 
 are his own, he never thinks that nature has brought 
 
 G 
 
98 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 them to him or that nature shares in them. He 
 always feels himself distinct from nature. In this 
 apartness, in this love of nature without the sense of 
 any vital kinship with her, he stands alone among 
 the poets of the nineteenth century ; but he is not 
 alone in Scotland. This is the way nature is re- 
 garded by the Lowland poets from the sixteenth 
 century down to Burns. Scott does not differ from 
 the rest. In his admiration, in his description of 
 nature, and in the manner of it he was the child of 
 a long ancestry. 
 
 Nor is there any moralising of nature. Scott 
 could not have made, like Wordsworth, the daisy 
 image the loveliness of humility and unself-con- 
 sciousness, nor could he have flung a garland of 
 fifty human fancies round the flower. He could 
 not, like Wordsworth, have filled the grove of yews 
 at Borrowdale with the tragic powers of human life, 
 with mighty primaeval forms like Time the Skeleton 
 and Death the Shadow, and made them recline in 
 the deep umbrage and listen to the mountain flood. 
 He would only have said that the daisy was yellow 
 and white, and shone like a star in the grass. He 
 would only have said the yews were dismal and 
 swarthy, and that no flowers grew in their baleful 
 shade.^ It is possible to feel that such direct de- 
 
 1 But here, 'twixt rock and river, grew 
 
 A dismal grove of sable yew. 
 With whose sad tints were mingled seen 
 The blighted fir's sepulchral green. 
 Seemed that the trees their shadows cast, 
 The earth that nourished them to blast j 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 99 
 
 scription is nearest to nature, and is the healthiest 
 way to look at her, but it does not suit us so well 
 as that of Wordsworth or Shelley ; because, being 
 troubled or pleased by philosophy or self-commun- 
 ing when we live with nature, we want the poets to 
 sympathise with us. Scott will not do this. The 
 only thing he does is at the end of his description 
 to tag on a moral or fanciful touch, like a piece of 
 gold lace on a garment without which the garment 
 would look all the better. Here is one : 
 
 Foxglove and nightshade side by side, 
 Emblems of punishment and pride. 
 
 Here is another : 
 
 Who loves not more the night of June 
 Than dull December's gloomy noon ? 
 The moonlight than the fog of frost ? 
 And can we say, which cheats the most ? 
 
 This is pure commonplace. 
 
 The conventionality of these moralities extended 
 itself to his descriptions of nature. He uses a 
 number of unimpassioned phrases, of careless adjec- 
 tives. It seems sometimes as if anything would do. 
 This habit grew upon him, and is more marked in 
 
 For never knew that swarthy grove 
 The verdant hue that fairies love ; 
 Nor wilding green, nor woodland flower. 
 Arose within its baleful bower j 
 The dank and sable earth receives 
 Its only carpet from the leaves, 
 That, from the withering branches cast, 
 Bestrewed the ground with every blast. 
 
100 STUDIES IN POETRY. 
 
 Rokeby than in any other of the poems. I even 
 think that his love of nature itself was afFected by 
 this artificial phrasing, and that his early passion for 
 her beauty did not return until he wrote of nature 
 in his novels. It is in the early poems, and when 
 he writes of how he felt in youth, that the conven- 
 tional note is not heard, that his verse reflects the 
 natural joy of his soul in the beauty of the world. 
 We lie with him and his friend on the hillside and 
 hear his heart beat. 
 
 The laverock whistled from the cloud, 
 The stream was lively, but not loud. 
 From the white thorn the May-flower shed 
 Its dewy fragrance round our head. 
 Not Ariel lived more merrily 
 Under the blossomed bough than we. 
 
 But even then it needed to make him perfectly 
 happy that he should have a memory of some far-oflF 
 day, a touch of chivalric romance to add to nature. 
 It was love of her, no doubt, but it was not love of 
 her alone. He felt the Celtic influence, but not 
 alone. 
 
 Another Celtic element in his poetry was his love 
 of colour. I need scarcely dwell on that, for Ruskin 
 has drawn full attention to it. He quotes, in proof 
 of his opinion, the fine description of Edinburgh in 
 Marmion beginning 
 
 Still on the spot Lord Marmion stayed, 
 
 in which the whole scene is painted in accordant 
 colours. And he gives many more examples. This 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT loi 
 
 special love of colour is keen in the Celtic race. 
 In all Irish and Welsh poems, many of which were 
 composed long before the English had emerged 
 from the Saxon forests, there is an extraordinary love 
 of colour. The landscape is described in its hues 
 rather than in its outlines. The birds, the insects, 
 the animals, are chiefly drawn in colour. Minute 
 and delicate shades of colour are determined, even 
 to the different tints of a mountain when the wind 
 is passing over it, or of the sea when the tide is 
 coming in. The heroes who fight or march are 
 always in a blaze of colour ; and every part of their 
 dress is described by its colour more than by its 
 stuff. As we read, the page flashes before our eyes. 
 The colour is often intemperately used, but even 
 in its intemperate use we feel how much it was loved 
 by the writer. 
 
 This rich, plenteous colour is rarely to be found 
 in the proper English poets after Chaucer up to 
 this century. But in the Lowland poetry of Scot- 
 land the love of it is very great. Men like Dunbar, 
 Douglas, even Lyndsay, — and I only name the 
 foremost, — in describing nature and men, describe 
 them like the Celts with a profusion of colour. At 
 a time when, in Surrey, Wyatt, or later in Spenser 
 and Shakespeare, colour is rarely dwelt on, the 
 pages of the Scottish poets are like an heraldic 
 shield, like nature herself in Italy, and not in the 
 cold north. 
 
 This is the Celtic colour passing down in the 
 Lowlands through the centuries, and living again 
 
102 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 in Scott. It is as fully shown in his description of 
 the personal appearance of men as Ruskin found it 
 in his description of nature. Here is the description 
 of Marmion : 
 
 Well was he armed from head to heel, 
 
 In mail and plate of Milan steel ; 
 
 But his strong helm, of mighty cost, 
 
 Was all with burnished gold embossed ; 
 
 Amid the plumage of the crest, 
 
 A falcon hovered on her nest. 
 
 With wings outspread, and forward breast ; 
 
 E'en such a falcon, on his shield. 
 
 Soared sable in an azure field : 
 
 The golden legend bore aright, 
 
 < Who checks at me, to death is dight.' 
 
 Blue was the charger's broidered rein ; 
 
 Blue ribbons decked his arching mane ; 
 
 The knightly housing's ample fold 
 
 Was velvet blue, and trapped with gold. 
 
 The Other Celtic element, the third which came 
 down to the Lowland poets, and does not appear in 
 the same kind in English poetry, is a certain 
 abusive, roaring, exaggerated wit — well represented 
 in Dunbar — indulged in with often as much intem- 
 perance as colour was indulged in, but frequently- 
 used with as much excellence — especially by Burns 
 — as the poets used colour. This element we do not 
 find in the poetry of Scott, but we do find, here 
 and there, the other side of it, that into which the 
 rollicking laughter of the Celt glides at a touch — 
 pathetic passionateness. And of this there are two 
 forms, the pathos of extreme tenderness for quiet 
 sorrow, and the greater pathos which comes from 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 103 
 
 feeling at rare moments the sense of the weird 
 which overhangs the world, which especially over- 
 shadows — as in Greek tragedy — the pridefulness of 
 youth forgetful of the gods. 
 
 Of the first in Scott there is no better example 
 than the Maid of Neidpath : 
 
 O lovers' eyes are sharp to see, 
 
 And lovers' ears in hearing ; 
 And love, in life's extremity, 
 
 Can lend an hour of cheering. 
 Disease had been in Mary's bower. 
 
 And slow decay from mourning. 
 Though now she sits on Neidpath's tower 
 
 To watch her love's returning. 
 
 All sunk and dim her eyes so bright. 
 
 Her form decayed by pining, 
 Till through her wasted hand, at night, 
 
 You saw the taper shining; 
 By fits a sultry hectic hue 
 
 Across her cheek was flying ; 
 By fits, so ashy pale she grew, 
 
 Her maidens thought her dying. 
 
 Yet keenest powers to see and hear 
 
 Seemed in her frame residing ; 
 Before the watchdog prick'd his ear 
 
 She heard her lover's riding ; 
 Ere scarce a distant form was ken'd. 
 
 She knew, and waved to greet him ; 
 And o'er the battlement did bend. 
 
 As on the wing to meet him. 
 
 He came — he pass'd — an heedless gaze, 
 
 As o'er some stranger glancing ; 
 Her welcome, spoke in faltering phrase, 
 
 Lost in his courser's prancing — 
 
104 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 The castle arch, whose hollow tone 
 
 Returns each whisper spoken, 
 Could scarcely catch the feeble moan, 
 
 Which told her heart was broken. 
 
 Of the second there Is none finer anywhere, in a 
 lyrical form, than the little half-ballad, half-lyric, of 
 Proud Maisie : 
 
 Proud Maisie is in the wood, 
 
 Walking so early ; 
 Sweet Robin sits on the bush. 
 
 Singing so rarely. 
 
 < Tell me, thou bonny bird. 
 
 When shall I marry me ? * — 
 
 * When six braw gentlemen 
 
 Kirkward shall carry ye.* 
 
 < Who makes the bridal bed, 
 
 Birdie, say truly I ' 
 
 * The grey-headed sexton 
 
 That delves the grave duly. 
 
 ' The glow-worm o'er grave and stone 
 
 Shall light thee steady ; 
 The owl from the steeple sing, 
 
 '* Welcome, proud lady." ' 
 
 That has the highest excellence, and another short 
 song in the same novel — the Heart of Midlothian — 
 approaches its tragic music, * Cauld is my bed, Lord 
 Archibald ! ' In a different form, but grim with 
 his transient, but not unfrequent, view of life, is the 
 little song in the most fateful of all Scott's stories, 
 the Bride of La?nmermoor. ' Look not thou on 
 beauty's charming,' it begins, ' do nothing in the 
 whole world which will bring the Qnwy of the gods 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 105 
 
 upon you, if you would live at ease and die in 
 peace.' 
 
 Look not thou on beauty's charming, — 
 Sit thou still when kings are arming, — 
 Taste not when the wine-cup glistens, — 
 Speak not when the people listens, — 
 Stop thine ear against the singer, — 
 From the red gold keep thy finger, — 
 Vacant heart, and hand, and eye. 
 Easy live and quiet die. 
 
 But to live at ease and die in peace was not Scott's 
 desire. His mounting spirit scorned fameless, in- 
 dolent, and luxurious days. All his poetry rings 
 with martial endeavour, constancy in pursuit of lofty 
 ends, contempt of apathy, love of romance. 
 
 Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife 1 
 
 To all the sensual world proclaim, 
 One crowded hour of glorious life 
 
 Is worth an age without a name. 
 
 So much for the Celtic elements, and their ap- 
 pearance in the poetry of Scott. 
 
 There were, moreover, two other elements, which 
 arose out of the history of Scotland, in the Lowland 
 poetry. The first of these is the love of distinct 
 individualities, the pleasure the poets had in men 
 who lived their own free independent life, and fought 
 for their own hand. It was a love which gave them 
 a great power of drawing distinct types of men. 
 The second is the intense and assertive nationality 
 of the poets. Both these, after a career of four 
 centuries, are vital in the poems of Walter Scott, and 
 connect him historically with all his predecessors. 
 
io6 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 With regard to the first, that is, the special indi- 
 vidual element, it arose out of the political state of 
 the country. The great barons were not brought 
 so decidedly under the monarch as they were in 
 England. They often fought for their own hand 
 against the crown. Like independent chieftains, 
 they went to war with one another. They lived 
 their own life in the midst of their own people. 
 Nor did this belong only to the higher ranks. Every 
 little border chieftain, almost every border farmer 
 was, or felt himself to be, his own master, and fought 
 for his own interest alone. There was no welding 
 together, or but little, of village to village, of county 
 to county, of the whole nation into one corporate body 
 in which men might learn to suppress their individual 
 wills in the interest of the whole. Even when this 
 came to be done, there was always close beside 
 them, in the Highlands, a great extent of country 
 in which individualism ran riot, in which every clan 
 boasted itself of its distinctness, in which every head 
 of a clan was like a little monarch. The example 
 of this, the influence of it, long ministered to the 
 Lowland lovers of individuality in political life ; and 
 on the Border, where war was always going on with 
 England, the habit of independent individualism 
 lasted till very late in the history of Scotland. 
 
 This is clearly seen all through Scottish poetry 
 from the year 1370 to this century, and Scott was 
 one of his race in this. He loved with all his 
 heart this free, original, individual life. He 
 found in it all the elements of the romance he 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 107 
 
 loved. The first thing he published was a collec- 
 tion and expansion of the Border ballads, in which 
 the personal passions, personal wars, personal legends 
 of men and women who lived alone in single towers 
 and on their own piece of land were recorded. 
 
 By the sword they won their land, 
 And by the sword they hold it still. 
 
 One of the most vigorous pieces of poetry in the 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel is the account of how the 
 Scotts won Eskdale from the Beattisons, and it 
 records a state of things in which individual war 
 and passion are unchecked. 
 
 It follows from this that Scott would have a 
 special delight in drawing clearly outlined types of 
 men, of all kinds from the king to the peasant. 
 We know from his novels how vital was his power 
 of individualising. There is nowhere, save in 
 Chaucer and Shakespeare, such a gallery of vivid 
 portraits of men and women as we have in the 
 work of Walter Scott. His pencil lives along each 
 line he wrote when he described a personality. 
 
 This power is not less vivid in his poetry. It 
 is not, of course, a power which is confined to Scot- 
 tish poets. All the greatest poets possess it. But 
 it came easily, owing to the conditions of Scottish 
 life, to the poets of Scotland, and its excellence in 
 the work of Scott places him, in that matter, if in 
 that alone, along with the greater poets. It is not 
 only that the men are drawn vividly. The men are 
 also types, and the types are as varied as they are 
 
io8 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 clear. Sir William of Deloraine, Roderick Dhu, the 
 Lord of Harden, Sir David Lyndsay, Marmion, 
 the Douglas in Marmion^ the Douglas in the Lady 
 of the Lake^ James iv., stand forth so clear that we 
 should know them if we met them now on a Border 
 moor. Nor is his outline less luminous when he 
 treats of the Border farmer, of the small chieftain, 
 of the archer, and the Highland vassal. Who that 
 has read it has forgotten the description of Wat 
 Tinlinn and his folk ? 
 
 Whiles thus he spoke, the bold yeoman 
 
 Entered the echoing barbican. 
 
 He led a small and shaggy nag 
 
 That through a bog from hag to hag 
 
 Could bound like any Billhope stag. 
 
 It bore his wife and children twain ; 
 
 A half-clothed serf was all their train ; 
 
 His wife, stout, ruddy, and dark-brow'd, 
 
 Of silver brooch and bracelet proud. 
 
 Laughed to her friends among the crowd. 
 
 He was of stature passing tall. 
 
 But sparely formed, and lean withal ; 
 
 A battered morion on his brow ; 
 
 A leather jack, as fence enow. 
 
 On his broad shoulders loosely hung ; 
 
 A Border axe behind was slung ; 
 
 His spear, six Scottish ells in length, 
 
 Seemed newly dyed in gore. 
 His shafts and bow, of wondrous strength, 
 
 His hardy partner bore. 
 
 The man stands alive before us. This is the 
 individualising power of Scott, and for further proof 
 of it we may read the description in Marmion^ 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 109 
 
 canto v., of the camp of James iv., when Marmion 
 and Fitz-Eustace ride into it. There Scott sketches 
 with his romantic, clear, and lively pencil the great 
 noble, the chivalric knight, the bold and youthful 
 squire, the stern burgher, the yeoman, the Borderer, 
 and the Highlander, all together, and yet so fiercely 
 individual are they, each and all, that it is with 
 difficulty peace is kept within the camp. 
 
 The second of these historical elements in which 
 Scott shares, and which connect him with all the 
 previous poets of Scotland, is his resolute nationality. 
 The English were as national as the Scots, and felt 
 as keen a patriotism. But they had no need to 
 assert it specially ; no one was trying to suppress 
 their national existence. On the other hand, for 
 many years, Scotland had to fight tooth and nail 
 against the efforts of England to overthrow her 
 national life. This, and the wars for freedom, left 
 their traces in all her poetry from James i., who had 
 been a captive in England shortly after the death 
 of Chaucer ; from Barbour, who wrote the deeds 
 of the Bruce before the death of Chaucer ; down 
 to Fergusson and Burns. Scotland, her liberty, her 
 heroes, her nationality, are thrust forward, almost 
 obtrusively, by every poet. This appears, even 
 more remarkably, in their natural description. In 
 the early poets the conventional form of beginning 
 a poem, borrowed from Chaucer, is used from the 
 time of James i. to Sir David Lyndsay in all the 
 more important poems. There is a dream, a May 
 morning, or a winter day ; but the point is this, 
 
no STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 that the traditionary landscape is departed from, 
 and a Scottish landscape introduced, which is de- 
 scribed with accuracy, and with the poet's eye upon 
 the subject. The Scottish poets became original 
 observers of nature through the force of their 
 national feeling. Every one knows how vivid the 
 Scottish landscape is in Burns, how he loves it, and 
 how passionately he speaks of his native land. And 
 this element is no less vigorous in Walter Scott, no 
 less determined, no less — I had almost said — obtru- 
 sive. His poems of other countries have no salt in 
 them, no fire. When he wrote cavalier songs, the 
 only one worth a chaplet is Bonny Dundee. Rokeby^ 
 even, though it belongs to the Border, is cold in 
 comparison to the three Scottish poems which pre- 
 ceded it. It is the natural description of his native 
 land, and of her fight for freedom, which redeems 
 the heaviness of the story of the Lord of the Isles. 
 The finest thing in Marmion is the description of 
 the last, stern, desperate struggle of king and noble, 
 burgher and peasant at Flodden Field, where, till 
 night fell on the fight, 
 
 The stubborn spearmen still made good 
 The dark impenetrable wood 
 
 against the English foe. 
 
 The men he loves most are those the tale of whose 
 life is steeped in loyalty to Scotland. The places 
 he loves most are those round which has gathered 
 the history of the Scottish chiefs, their wars, their 
 piping, their loves, their woes, their castles, their 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT iii 
 
 exile life in moor and cave and forest. The scenery 
 he loves most and describes the best is the scenery 
 of the Border, the wind of whose hills blows freshly 
 through his verse, and of the Highland country 
 close to the Lowland frontier, where every step has 
 its ancestral story. For the Highlands themselves 
 he does not care so much, for they are not so close 
 to the theatre of the national war. The piece of 
 country outside the Border he most delights in is 
 the piece round Stirling and Edinburgh. Edinburgh 
 itself, the centre of his land, is passionately loved 
 and described. ' Mine own romantic town,' he 
 cries in Marmion^ and Lyndsay smiled, nor did 
 Marmion frown when Fitz-Eustace's heart, en- 
 raptured at the beauty of the scene from Blackford 
 Hill, broke out : 
 
 O, where 's the coward that would not dare 
 To fight for such a land. 
 
 The most passionate outburst in the Lay of the Last 
 Minstrel is the address to his country and its 
 scenery : 
 
 Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, 
 Who never to himself hath said, 
 
 This is my own, my native land ! 
 Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd, 
 As home his footsteps he hath turn'd, 
 
 From wandering on a foreign strand ! 
 If such there breathe, go, mark him well ; 
 For him no minstrel raptures swell ; 
 High though his titles, proud his name, 
 Boundless his wealth as wish can claim ; 
 
112 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Despite those titles, power, and pelf, 
 
 The wretch, concentred all in self. 
 
 Living, shall forfeit fair renown. 
 
 And, doubly dying, shall go down 
 
 To the vile dust, from whence he sprung. 
 
 Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung. 
 
 O Caledonia ! stern and wild. 
 
 Meet nurse for a poetic child ! 
 
 Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, 
 
 Land of the mountain and the flood, 
 
 Land of my sires ! what mortal hand 
 
 Can e'er untie the filial band. 
 
 That knits me to thy rugged strand ! 
 
 Still, as I view each well-known scene, 
 
 Think what is now, and what hath been, 
 
 Seems as, to me, of all bereft. 
 
 Sole friends thy woods and streams were left ; 
 
 And thus I love them better still. 
 
 Even in extremity of ill. 
 
 By Yarrow's stream still let me stray. 
 
 Though none should guide my feeble way ; 
 
 Still feel the breeze down Ettrick break. 
 
 Although it chill my withered cheek ; • 
 
 Still lay my head by Teviot Stone, 
 
 Though there, forgotten and alone. 
 
 The Bard may draw his parting groan. 
 
 We listen to the very heart of Scott ; the life- 
 blood of his poetry flows in it. He never lost that 
 passion. It ceased to be joyous, it became full of 
 sadness. The noble, but desperate struggle of his 
 later years, the noblest eiFort recorded, I think, 
 in English literature, of an enduring, strong, and 
 faithful battle with misfortune, a battle which, while 
 he conquered in it, killed him — made his love of 
 country sorrowful, but did not lessen its intensity. 
 
SIR WALTER SCOTT 113 
 
 His youthful summer ' danced by on wings of game 
 and glee/ The dark ^ storm reserved its rage ' 
 
 Against the winter of his age, 
 
 but in the storm of winter age, as in the summer 
 of youth, he was always the impassioned patriot. 
 
 When he was smitten with paralysis in 1830-1, 
 he was sent to the Mediterranean to recover 
 strength ; but 
 
 Nature's loveliest looks, 
 Art's noblest relics, history's rich bequests, 
 Failed to reanimate, and but feebly cheered, 
 The whole world's Darling. 
 
 The news of Goethe's death was brought him. 
 ' He, at least, died at home,' said Scott, ' let us to 
 Abbotsford.' They carried him through London 
 across England to Scotland. He lay all but lifeless 
 in his carriage, as he drew near to the scenes he 
 loved so well. *As we descended' says Lockhart 
 ' the vale of Gala, he began to gaze about him, and 
 by degrees it was obvious that he was recognising 
 the features of that familiar landscape. Presently 
 he murmured a name or two — '^ Gala water, surely, 
 Buckholm, Torwoodlee." As we rounded the hill 
 and the outline of the Eildons burst upon him he 
 became greatly excited ; and when, turning himself 
 on his couch, his eye caught at length his own 
 towers, at the distance of a mile, he sprang up with 
 a cry of delight.' 
 
 H 
 
114 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 And there, on a lovely day, ^so perfectly still 
 that the sound of all others most delicious to his 
 ears, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, 
 was distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, 
 his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes.' 
 
INAUGURAL ADDRESS TO THE 
 SHELLEY SOCIETY, Wednesday, March 
 lo, 1886, at University College, London. 
 
 It has been asked, * Why have a Shelley Society ? 
 Those who care for him will read him without the 
 impulse of such a Society, nor will they enjoy him 
 the more, but the less perhaps, when they hear 
 what the critics have to say about him.' The 
 question has a good deal of weight, but the answer 
 is that it ' is our humour ' to have the Society, and 
 that four hundred persons have also said, ' It is 
 my humour,' — and an excellent reason it is for any 
 literary society whatever. But we are also interested 
 in collecting all that has been said about Shelley in 
 the past, not for the purpose of helping us to love 
 his poetry more, but for the sake of entertaining 
 ourselves with the contrast between the opinions of 
 critics concerning a true poet when he is alive, and 
 the view taken of him by the world when he has 
 been dead for sixty years. Shelley is one of the 
 most striking instances in our time of the way in 
 which an artist, ignored or abused in his own day, 
 rises from the grave into which the critics have 
 trampled him, and, when their noxious names have 
 
 116 
 
ii6 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 perished, lives as a power in the hearts of men. 
 This kind of thing fits our humour, both when we 
 are a little spiteful with the analytic tribe, and also 
 when we wish to cherish our own appreciation of 
 Shelley. 
 
 Then, again, it pleases us to have facsimiles of 
 the first editions of Shelley, and other bibliographical 
 curiosities. I do not say that this is a very high 
 ambition, nor that it has anything to do with love 
 of poetry ; yet it is a harmless and innocent fancy, 
 and just as good as the little fancies other folk may 
 have about great men for whom they care. A lover 
 likes everything that puts him in mind of his mis- 
 tress, even a picture of the room she dwelt in, 
 and we may like to see how Shelley clothed his 
 books. For in this case there is a distinct interest. 
 Shelley looked after the 'get-up' of many of his 
 poems and pamphlets himself, above all, those that 
 were printed in Italy, and we seem to touch his 
 personality in these examples. 
 
 Moreover, there is another reason for our Society. 
 There are persons, most of whom already belong to 
 us, who have made Shelley, his life and poetry, a 
 special study. Many things continually occur to 
 them which may be worth saying briefly, but which 
 would scarcely form enough material for a public 
 paper. In this Society these persons will find room 
 to air their theories and criticisms; and some of 
 them will be interesting hereafter. Once m6re,.as 
 another biography of Shelley will soon be published, 
 several new questions will be before us, and we shall 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 117 
 
 all be interested to hear, through this Society, the 
 discussion of these questions. 
 
 After all has been said, however, these reasons for 
 this Society run up into the first — ' It is our humour.' 
 We are lovers of Shelley, and we like to bring together 
 into one body a number of persons who will not only 
 make him a lonely pleasure, but will combine to read, 
 study, and talk about him with one another. 
 
 Secondly, the question, ' Why should we have a 
 Shelley Society ? ' brings us face to face with those 
 persons who, while they really care for poetry, do 
 not care for Shelley's poetry. I can imagine Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold, who is such a person, being even 
 distressed in mind, or perhaps contemptuous, when 
 he hears of this Society. He has discovered, after 
 he has divested his mind of the personal charm of 
 Shelley, ^ the incurable want in his poetry of a sound 
 subject-matter, and the incurable fault, in conse- 
 quence, of unsubstantiality ' ; and I fear lest he 
 should extend this accusation to us in general. He 
 will tell us we are about to study the unsubstantial, 
 and that no good can come of it. He will advise us 
 to turn to Wordsworth — there is a poet who has 
 laid hold of the poet's right subject-matter. Again 
 he cries. Turn to Byron — there is a poet, selections 
 from whom will make up a volume which for real 
 substance, power, and worth, will far overweigh a 
 volume from Shelley. 
 
 Well, with regard to Byron, I am quite willing to 
 say that he is at present underrated and that Arnold's 
 attempt to place him in a higher position is a just 
 
ii8 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 thing to do. But why could he not leave Shelley 
 alone? why weaken his praise of Byron by a dis- 
 praise of Shelley, which proves that he has lost the 
 power he once had of distinguishing what was best 
 in imagination, in art, and in melody ? Even now, 
 I should like to appeal from Mr. Arnold the critic to 
 Mr. Arnold the poet ; but it would be no use, for 
 he actually maintains that selections from Byron 
 are more interesting and more valuable than any 
 selections from Shelley. It is a very fantastic asser- 
 tion on his lips, and the books, I venture to say, 
 prove that he is wrong. Byron does not shine in 
 selections, Shelley does ; nor, indeed, can Byron 
 compare with Shelley in what Mr. Arnold would 
 call 'truth, seriousness of substance and matter, 
 felicity of diction and manner.' Felicity of diction 
 and manner ! That is the most amusing of the 
 comparisons. 
 
 Byron was rarely true to himself in his poetry ; 
 no, not altogether, I believe, in Don Juan^ at 
 least, not in the closing cantos. Indeed, I doubt 
 whether, during a good portion of his life, until 
 he was weary of vanity and acting, he had any 
 self to which to be true, so much had he overlaid 
 his own personality with another which he dressed 
 up for the world. It is this falsehood, or rather 
 fiction, in his work which will always prevent men 
 and women from loving it as well as they love 
 Shelley, who is always true to himself. Goethe, 
 who praised Byron's work, mistook the unreal for the 
 real man, because the unreal was done with so much 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 119 
 
 power, and because he read Byron in a foreign 
 tongue. A great deal too much has been made 
 of the great German's praise (which indeed he 
 carefully modified), without any thought of how 
 changed his view would have become had he been 
 able to recognise that the whole sentiment of 
 Byron's earlier work was not true. Werther was 
 ten times more true to Goethe than Manfred was to 
 Byron. 
 
 Shelley was not so blinded in this matter — and I 
 may as well interpolate here what Shelley thought of 
 Byron, remembering always how unenvious and how 
 frank Shelley's judgment was. It has been said by 
 Mr. Arnold ' that Shelley knew well the difference 
 between the achievement of such a poet as Byron 
 and his own. He praises Byron too unreservedly, 
 but he sincerely felt, and he was right in feeling, 
 that Byron was a greater poetical power than him- 
 self.' One would think from this that Shelley had 
 praised all Byron's work, and that he had never felt 
 the weakness of Byron in poetry. He does say 
 with regard to one of the cantos of Don Juan^ that 
 it sets Byron not only above, but far above, all the 
 poets of the day — every word is stamped with im- 
 mortality. ' I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well 
 I may.' — He does say with regard to Cain ^ that it is 
 the finest thing any poet has produced in England 
 since Paradise Regained'' — a phrase which proves 
 Shelley's friendship for Byron, or his pleasure in an 
 attack on orthodox religion, more than his critical 
 acumen. But that, with the exception of a fragment 
 
120 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 and a sonnet among the poems which depreciate him- 
 self and exalt Byron, is nearly all ; and it is a small 
 foundation on which to build so large and so con- 
 fident an assertion as that which Mr. Arnold makes. 
 The fact is, that Shelley had no such unreserved an 
 opinion about Lord Byron's work, and sometimes 
 contrasted it (but only to his friends) with his own. 
 ' If Marino Faliero is a drama/ he says, ^ then The 
 Cenci is not.' He differed also, and as much as 
 possible, from Byron about poetry. He declared 
 that ' Byron patronised a system of criticism only 
 fit for the production of mediocrity, and though all 
 his fine poems have been produced in defiance of 
 this system, yet I recognise the pernicious effects 
 of it in the Doge of Venice.^ He is indignant with 
 the spirit — the want of truth, the tone of mind, 
 which animates certain cantos of Childe Harold. 
 ^ It is a spirit, which, if insane, is the most wicked 
 and mischievous insanity : an obstinate and self- 
 willed folly in which he hardens himself. Lord 
 Byron is heartily and deeply discontented with him- 
 self, and contemplating in the distorted mirror of 
 his own thoughts the nature and the destiny of 
 man, what can he behold but objects of contempt 
 and despair .? ' At least Shelley did not think 
 that Byron had 'seriousness of subject or matter' 
 — and as to Shelley's poetical judgment on Childe 
 Harold^ this phrase which follows does not prove 
 that he was unreserved in his praise. It is 
 almost contemptuous. ' But that he is a great poet 
 I think his address to Ocean proves.' He had a 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 121 
 
 sincere, even an enthusiastic admiration for Byron's 
 power; with his characteristic modesty he placed 
 his work below Byron's ; but there were hours 
 when he felt quite differently, and knew, like Words- 
 worth, that if Byron was among the immortals, so 
 was he. Moreover, he felt, and felt strongly, that 
 Byron had not the qualities which make a poet 
 always great. What those qualities are he has him- 
 self laid down. For he asks concerning Ariosto — 
 ^ Where is the gentle seriousness, the delicate sensi- ' 
 bility, the calm and sustained energy, without which 
 true greatness cannot be ? ' These were not qualities 
 he saw in Byron ; nor had he the slightest sympathy 
 with his friend's desire to attract to himself the 
 wonder or the admiration of the world. This 
 element in Byron's poetry was incomprehensible by 
 Shelley, who, though he desired to live in men's 
 hearts, was wholly without care for the applause of 
 the world. Here is a phrase from one of his 
 letters : 
 
 * I am fully repaid for the painful emotions from 
 which some verses of my poem sprung, by your 
 sympathy and approbation — which is all the reward 
 I expect — and as much as I desire. It is not for me 
 to judge whether, in the high praise your feelings 
 assign me, you are right or wrong. The poet and 
 the man are two different natures ; though they 
 exist together, they may be unconscious of each 
 other, and incapable of deciding on each other's 
 powers and efforts by any reflex act. The decision 
 of the cause, whether or no I am a poet, is removed 
 
122 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 from the present time to the hour when our pos- 
 terity shall assemble ; but the court is a very severe 
 one, and I fear that the verdict will be, " Guilty — 
 death ! " ' 
 
 The fact is that Shelley did care for truth, and 
 was always true to himself Whether he was the 
 poet with high hopes for man, or the poet who 
 describes himself — it is always Shelley that we see 
 and feel in his poetry, not a man made up in any 
 way for presentation to the world. We are in 
 contact with a clear individuality, as we are with 
 Wordsworth ; and this makes Shelley vitally Inter- 
 esting to all those who have anything, naturally, 
 of his temper, or who at certain times of their lives 
 pass through the supersensuous realm In which he 
 lived. It is by no means a common temper, and 
 because of its want of touch with daily life, with 
 simple sorrows and pleasures, I never claim for 
 Shelley a position equal with Wordsworth when I 
 ) compare the whole of the one poet's work with that 
 ( of the other ; but the temper of Shelley is a real 
 human temper, and It is the same, with the subtle 
 \ changes wrought by the years. In its twofold mani- 
 festation — social and personal — from the beginning 
 , to the end. This truthfulness to his own nature Is 
 plain enough in the longer poems. It is as plain In 
 ^ ' the lyrics ; every lyric is an outburst of himself, of 
 what he felt passionately for others or for himself. 
 
 As to the lyrics themselves, who can compare 
 them to Byron's ? Take all Byron's lyrics together 
 — will they outweigh three or four of Shelley's? 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 123 
 
 Take the Cain which Shelley thought so great ; will 
 it stand comparison with the Prometheus Unbound'? 
 I do not mean only in poetical quality of verse, or in 
 imaginative conception — but in gravity of thought, 
 in freedom from self-consideration, in serious at- 
 tempt, founded on serious thinking, to grasp the 
 problem of evil and of good. 
 
 The same kind of truthfulness extended to Shel- 
 ley's drawing of natural scenery. Byron, even in 
 his best descriptions, introduces lines which show us 
 that he was not lost in love of that which he de- 
 scribed, metaphors which are so far-fetched that we 
 know he was working, if I may so express it, in the 
 studio, and not from nature herself ; sudden screams 
 of his own personality ; false notes which take us 
 away from the object, and which have nothing to do 
 with it. A metaphor like that contained in these 
 lines : 
 
 O night, and storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong, 
 And lovely in your loveliness, as is the light 
 Of a dark eye in woman ; 
 
 or this — when he is dwelling on the rainbow which 
 arches over the cataract of Velino : 
 
 Resembling, 'mid the torture of the scene, 
 Love watching madness with unalterable mien — 
 
 are not to be found, nor anything resembling their 
 far-fetched untruthfulness, from end to end of 
 Shelley — not even when he is most victimised by 
 his own intemperance of imagination. At his very 
 
124 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 worst, even when he is most redundant, he Is true to 
 nature. At his best, he Is Involved In nature, and 
 describes what he sees of her with the closest accu- 
 racy to the general and changing Impression of the 
 scene. Like Turner, he painted his impressions, 
 but the Impressions are true to things as they are. I 
 challenge the descriptive poetry of this century In 
 England to surpass In accuracy of observation, and In 
 composition of an Imaginative whole, the descrip- 
 tion which occurs In the Prometheus of the great 
 Alpine valley seen at dawn from the heights above It. 
 In splendour and In truth it stands clear In the 
 poetry which describes sublime and vast nature ; and 
 the way In which It closes, with a comparison which 
 binds up the whole scene with human history, and 
 which fits like a glove to the matter described and 
 to the subject of the poem, may well be compared 
 with such paltry analogies as Byron's of the rainbow 
 to love and the cataract to madness. 
 
 As to truth to human nature — I have elsewhere 
 said that when Shelley wrote about himself, he often 
 described a certain vague, sceptical, discontented, 
 aspiring or depressed condition of human life which 
 has a great interest for us at the present time, 
 because so many of us share In it, and among these 
 some of his critics. But It Is a condition of which 
 he himself strongly disapproves. The preface to 
 Alastor Is enough to allege as evidence of this dis- 
 approval. He wrote that poem In order to get rid, 
 as far as possible, of this condition, and so far the 
 matter of the poem was serious. The only cure for 
 
OF 
 
 ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 125 
 
 it in the poem was death; and Shelley was never 
 cured of its recurrent attacks until he died. 
 
 Another set of his poems, those which belong to 
 love, to regrets, to metaphysical passion, cannot be 
 said to be serious in substance. They are woven of 
 ether and fine fire, but nevertheless they are true to 
 human nature, to many passing phases of feeling, and 
 no one else has embodied these remote and subtle 
 phases. Our life is not all passed in the realm of 
 realities, of simple sorrows and joys. We are often 
 such stuff as dreams are made of, and we suffer and 
 rejoice as much in our illusions — if they are not 
 often the truest things in life — as in that which we 
 call real life. If, however, all Shelley's poetry con- 
 sisted of this soft-spun cloudland, of this ethereal 
 quintessence of delicate imaginings, we might fairly 
 blame him ; but it did not. We accept this side, 
 then, of his work, and are grateful to him for ex- 
 pressing that in us which no English poet has ever 
 expressed so well. 
 
 But it would be unfair, on account of these per- 
 sonal poems, to say that Shelley had no serious 
 human aims. There was another side to his poetry. 
 It is the poetry he dedicated to the service of man- 
 kind. And it is in this that we find that gravity 
 of substance and matter which Mr. Arnold denies 
 and desires. The matter was not the matter of 
 Wordsworth or Tennyson ; it does not treat of 
 , human life as it is. But it treats of what is also of 
 great importance to us — of human life as it may 
 become when it is freed from evils. Shelley brought 
 
126 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 those evils forward, described them as he hated 
 them, and caused a great and increasing number of 
 people to hate them and oppose them more heartily. 
 Few in poetry have done more than he to overthrow 
 false conceptions of God, to undo the network of 
 false reverences ; to shake the foundations of injustice, 
 of cruel superstition, of tyranny, of caste, of slavery 
 of mind and body. This is part of the grave 
 matter of his poetry, and it employs itself in con- 
 structive as well as destructive work. He not only 
 denounced injustice, he loved justice and revealed 
 it — not vague justice, but justice made universal in 
 act. Freedom was dear to him, and above all love ; 
 and his human poetry is steeped in these as a 
 summer garden is in sunshine. Nor is there any 
 tenderer song of the loveliness and duty of absolute 
 and unrevenging forgiveness than is heard through 
 Shelley's poetry. These are serious things that he 
 has given to us, and the world will always be grate- 
 ful for this religious gravity in his teaching. It is a 
 high matter for a poet's work, and it will have more 
 and more of effect on men. For the whole question 
 of the social future of man is rising in a special way 
 into increasing eminence ; and the method Shelley 
 laid down for attaining the perfect state is that of 
 Jesus Christ ; and is stated by him with strong 
 reiteration. That method is in direct opposition 
 to the method of force, of punishment, even to the 
 method of enactment, and the faith in its efficacy 
 was bound up with his whole being. Whatever we 
 may think of the lesson or of the way he gave it, it 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 127 
 
 is not wanting in grave purpose, nor in substance, 
 nor is it an unsubstantial foundation for poetry. To 
 preach justice and mercy, and love and freedom, to 
 lay down the spiritual means of their attainment, and 
 to extol them in exultant verse, is part of the serious 
 business of all poets, and their best work, as Words- 
 worth's, has been done at the time when they felt 
 these duties to humanity as a passion. Never to 
 falter in these causes, and to fight against their 
 enemies, without fear of the world or without care, 
 was Shelley's honour, and I would that all poets 
 had been as faithful and as unworldly. 
 
 It is true that the form in which this matter was 
 cast was exceedingly ideal, that its verse was some- 
 times visionary, that it was over-weighted with 
 images, and encumbered by too much ornament, 
 that it does not speak with enough directness ; but 
 we are not to deny the matter because of the form, 
 and the form belongs to the whole temper of 
 Shelley's mind. It was his way of putting things 
 of profound importance into verse. And we know 
 how serious they seemed to him when we look at 
 his life. He devoted it to a practical support of 
 these noble ideas. The simple, the unworldly life 
 he lived may well be contrasted with Byron's. It 
 was as retired, as plain, as affectionate as Words- 
 worth's, and less self-regardant. It never sought for 
 fame. It was lived in the most accurate morality 
 after the troubles of his youth had passed. The 
 man had natural piety. He was pious towards 
 nature, towards his friends, towards the whole 
 
128 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 human race, towards the meanest insect of the 
 forest, towards the unimaginable Love whom he 
 did not define, but whom he felt behind and in 
 the universe. Here is the testimony of one who 
 knew him best. ' His life was as simple as a 
 hermit's. He rose early in the morning, walked 
 and read before breakfast, took that meal sparingly, 
 wrote and studied the greater part of the morning, 
 dined on vegetables (for he took neither meat nor 
 wine), conversed with his friends, again walked out, 
 and usually finished with reading to his wife till ten 
 o'clock, when he went to bed. His reading was 
 always among the great books of the world. He 
 was as generous as the day, and he had no idea of 
 love unconnected with sentiment. He worked 
 among the poor, inquired personally into the lives 
 of those who sought his help, visited the sick (hav- 
 ing prepared himself for this by going the round of 
 the hospitals), and kept a regular list of industrious 
 poor, whom he assisted with small sums to make 
 up their accounts.' 
 
 ' Plain living and high thinking ' were in England 
 while Shelley lived in it ; and we can understand 
 the horror he expressed at Byron's life in Venice, 
 and his feeling that no good poetic work could be 
 done by Byron as long as he continued it. If con- 
 duct is so close to high poetry as is said, the poetry 
 of Shelley ought to be full of lofty impulse to man- 
 kind ; and it has impelled men, and will continue 
 to impel them, to noble thought and action. He 
 believed in goodness, he believed in its ultimate 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 129 
 
 triumph, and we recommend the belief to an age of 
 scepticism and pessimism. He hated materialism 
 both as a philosophy and a practice, and we recom- 
 mend the hatred to an age which tends to refer all 
 things to matter, and which seems often to think 
 that to improve the material life of man is all that 
 is needed for the healing of the woes and sins 
 of the human race. He preached the duty of an 
 unworldly life, and he defended the cause of the 
 poor and the workmen ; and though he was often 
 the poet of the thin clouds and sunsets of the mind, 
 he also seized on substantial truth as his subject- 
 matter when he preached deliverance to the captive, 
 and to let the oppressed go free. Moreover, as he 
 grew older, his style became more trenchant when- 
 ever he had to deal with his human subject. He 
 still wrote metaphysical dr^ms like the Triumph of 
 Life^ but that he could when he pleased go straight 
 to his human matter, and write of it with incisive 
 power, is proved by his fragment of Charles I, 
 Would he had finished it ; but he was too troubled 
 then. Had not old Proteus taken him, in love of 
 him, we might have had verse from him of ' power 
 no longer girt with weakness.' The lines I quote 
 are direct enough, fitted to be heard to-day by men 
 who see social evils and wish to remedy them, 
 serious, close to the modern as to the ancient evil. 
 They are spoken of the luxuriant pageant that passes 
 by in the midst of the misery and poor of London. 
 
 Ay, there they are — 
 Nobles, and sons of nobles, patentees, 
 
 I 
 
130 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Monopolists, and stewards of this poor farm, 
 On whose lean sheep sit the prophetic crows. 
 TIere is the pomp that strips the houseless orphan, 
 Here is the pride that breaks the desolate heart. 
 These are the lilies glorious as Solomon, 
 Who toil not, neither do they spin, — unless 
 It be the webs they catch poor rogues withal. 
 Here is the surfeit which to them who earn 
 The niggard wages of the earth, scarce leaves 
 The tithe that will support them till they crawl 
 Back to its cold hard bosom. Here is health 
 Followed by grim disease, glory by shame, 
 Waste by lame famine, wealth by squalid want, 
 And England's sin by England's punishment. 
 
 As to the artistry of his verse, the steady increase 
 of its beauty and temperance, which is observable 
 in the work of the last years of his life, encourages 
 a deep regret that he did not live longer to present 
 us with work of even a greater felicity of diction 
 and manner. When he is at his best, when he has 
 carefully corrected his poetry for publication, he is 
 rarely negligent in his language. He went over his 
 verses again and again, making many experiments, 
 changes, additions, excisions — a poet not easily 
 satisfied with his work; an artist eager for per- 
 fection. It is by the poems he allowed to be chosen 
 for publication that he is to be judged as an artist ; 
 not by the numerous pieces of unfledged verse 
 which his unbridled admirers have printed. They 
 are worth having, for the most part, because his 
 imagination is always moving in them, but they are 
 not examples of his artistry. This is a distinction 
 which should be made, because those critics who 
 
 -A 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 131 
 
 depreciate Shelley have lumped all his poems 
 together, and use the inferior poems he did not set 
 forth as finished as materials for their criticism. 
 
 The technique of his lyrics is, however, rarely in 
 fault. They have a most lovely, singular, high- 
 enchanted charm. Their movement is extraordi- 
 narily musical, varied and inventive, and full of 
 sweet, strange changes. But so much has been said 
 of this that I leave it aside. What I wish to dwell 
 on is the blank verse. We have had a great deal 
 of blank verse in England, and written in many 
 fashions since Marlowe began it, and Shakespeare 
 perfected it, in the drama, since Milton clenched it 
 into its proper epic form ; but since Milton wrote 
 the Samson Agonistes there has been no dramatic 
 blank verse so free, so natural, yet so dignified, so 
 weighty in sound, so changing in pause, yet so 
 obedient to law, as that which Shelley used with 
 ease. In undramatic poetry, the only modern blank 
 verse which can be compared with Shelley's (to speak 
 only of the dead) is that of Wordsworth, Keats, and 
 Tennyson. Wordsworth sins from inequality of 
 level and of music ; from a frequent dulness, as of 
 accented prose. Keats reaches great ease and beauty 
 in the verse of Hyperion^ but he does not as yet know 
 his instrument well enough, or he has not made 
 it quite his own. It resembles Milton too much. 
 Tennyson has made his own instrument ; It has its 
 Doric beauty, and the playing on it is full of 
 conscious art. But the art is too much seen, the 
 technique too easy to be imitated. It is over- 
 
132 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 mannered, while the blank verse of Mr. Arnold is 
 over over-mannered. But Shelley, even in Alastor, 
 used bFank verse as if it were his natural tongue. 
 It is sweet and clear and flowing, quite his own, 
 changing with his mood and with the passion of 
 his thought, close-knit or let free, exactly as the 
 mind within him drove, or the subject claimed. 
 But it was by no means finished or formed then. 
 It had a beautiful and graceful nature, but it needed 
 education and practice. It was much more noble in 
 the Prometheus^ weightier yet easier in The Cenci. 
 I am not sure that it is not at its best in the frag- 
 ment of Charles /., the last piece of blank verse he 
 wrought. 
 
 These are the things I had to say concerning 
 Shelley's truth, seriousness of matter, and felicity 
 of musical expression, and with none of them, 
 except partly with the last, will Mr. Arnold agree. 
 But then Mr. Arnold, in this matter of Shelley, 
 has allowed his dislike to Shelley's unsubstantiality 
 to prejudice him against the whole of Shelley's 
 poetry. His judgment has been victimised by 
 his personal fancy, and we have the proof of it 
 from his own lips. Here is his astonishing state- 
 ment. 'Except for a few short things and single 
 stanzas, his original poetry is less satisfactory than 
 his translations, for in these the subject-matter was 
 found for him.' That is petulant enough, the pro- 
 duct of personal feeling, but we may excuse it on 
 the ground of his love of his theory with regard 
 to the subject-matter of poetry. But when once 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 133 
 
 a man gets on the horse of prejudice it runs 
 away with him, and he loses his critical sanity in 
 some galloping assertion. He is driven into ?n 
 exaggeration which is all the more amazing, inas- 
 much as he thinks it marked by excessive temper- 
 ance. This is, alas ! the end of what Arnold says 
 of Shelley : ^ Nay, I doubt whether his delightful 
 essays and letters will not resist the wear and tear of 
 time better, and finally come to stand higher, than 
 his poetry.' I do not wonder that Mr. Swinburne 
 said of that very strange and interesting phrase, 
 that no critical reputation, not even the highest, 
 could bear, without ruin, to make a few more judg- 
 ments of that kind. At any rate, it frees us from 
 being much troubled by the sentence pronounced by 
 Mr. Arnold upon Shelley. On this point he has him- 
 self proved his own incapacity to show us any light. 
 I have said these things in general about Shelley 
 because this is a public lecture, and if one can clear 
 away a public accusation against a poet it is always 
 well. But in the more private work which this 
 Shelley Society proposes to do, such general state- 
 ments will not be necessary. What will be necessary 
 from those who are convinced of Shelley's greatness 
 will be temperance and distinctiveness in praise. 
 No good is done to Shelley, no good is done to the 
 love of poetry in men, no desire to read a poet is 
 encouraged, by assertions which run into excess. It 
 is as bad, as prejudiced, as wild, to say that he is the 
 greatest poet since Shakespeare, or that he is greater 
 than Wordsworth, without making any distinctions, 
 
134 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 as It is to say that his letters will stand higher than 
 his poetry. Both phrases are marked by a want 
 of sanity of judgment. It is only after weighing 
 the whole of Shelley's work, after long considera- 
 tion of the dijfferences between his character and 
 aims and those of his contemporaries, of the several 
 ranges of their work, that any critic should presume 
 to say in what relation to other poets, and on what 
 an eminence, Shelley should be placed. General 
 praise is a mistake. Criticism does not consist in a 
 number of adjectives, in a number of metaphors, or 
 in a number of hazarded phrases. When it seeks 
 to find out faults, I never think it worth much, but 
 if it is done at all, it ought to be done well, and 
 above all in a spirit of meekness, considering our- 
 selves lest we should also be tempted to write. 
 
 I also recommend to the Shelley Society not to 
 exalt their poet by attacking other poets. Perhaps 
 you will say I have myself done this, and have 
 attacked Byron. No, were I to write of him, I 
 should not fail to express my honour for the work 
 he did, and for the power with which it was done. 
 I have only spoken of Byron in this fashion because 
 Shelley had been unjustly depreciated in order to 
 exalt Byron. 
 
 This is the first advice I presume to give to the 
 Shelley Society. Let praise be temperate and dis- 
 tinctive ; else you will repel and not attract members 
 to your ranks. The rest which I have to say is on 
 the subjects which I should like to suggest to the 
 members of this Society. 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 135 
 
 First, there is the comparison of Shelley's opinions 
 on religious and social topics as stated in his prose 
 with the embodiment of the same opinions in his 
 poetry. The contrast itself is curious. Shelley's 
 views on these matters are put forward in prose, 
 save when the prose is deliberately made poetic as in 
 the fragment of The Coliseum^ in the quietest, coolest, 
 most balanced manner, and with all the strictness of 
 logic of which he was capable. He reasons in prose 
 on the existence of a great Cause, and of what sort 
 that Cause is ; on the for and against of immortality ; 
 on the evils of society, on the method to overcome 
 them ; on the hopes of man — with as great temper- 
 ance both of argument and metaphor as if he were 
 Stuart Mill. But when the same subjects are trans- 
 ferred to his poetry, he soars with them into the 
 upper sky, and they become children of the lightning 
 and the sun. But he has always their prose founda- 
 tion in his own mind. 
 
 Then he had a way with him, when writing 
 poetry, of becoming more impassionated than other 
 poets around his subject. All that there was in it of 
 hope, all that in the past it had given of grandeur 
 to the mind of man, and of impulse to human work, 
 added itself to his own passion, and he was borne far 
 beyond the balanced statements of his prose. It 
 would be well worth while to make these compari- 
 sons, and to study this manner in the man. 
 
 Then, we ought to collect all the prose fragments 
 he wrote on love, and compare them with his poetry 
 on this subject ; I do not mean with the love lyrics, 
 
136 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 but with the poems on the idea of love. No one 
 can understand Alastor^ Prince Athanase^ Epipsychi- 
 dioHy and many of the shorter pieces, who does not 
 know the Platonic idea of love, and the form which 
 Petrarch gave that idea, a form which profoundly- 
 influenced Elizabethan poetry. Yet even then, those 
 who wish to penetrate into Shelley's realm of ideal 
 love will have to isolate and separate the new element 
 which Shelley, in his leavening individuality, added 
 to the Platonic conception. This would be well 
 worth doing, and it cannot be done without the help 
 of the prose writings on this subject, such as Una 
 Favolay The Coliseum^ and the short essay. On Love. 
 Then again, there is his theory of a spiritual 
 universe, the special turn of which by Shelley is 
 interesting from the personal point of view, and 
 which in itself requires to be clearly stated, in order 
 to understand not only the expressions used in 
 describing nature, but also many of the poems which 
 refer to death, and the kind of life which he 
 frequently conceives for himself after death, or for 
 his friends. I dare say many will remember (to 
 give an example) the lines on the death of his son, 
 and the closing stanzas of the Sensitive Plant. As 
 to the natural descriptions, and the songs about the 
 universe and even the personages themselves in the 
 Prometheus^ there can be no full delight taken in 
 these till we have grasped Shelley's conception of a 
 living universe, the moving spirit of which was 
 Love. There are many phrases in the prose works 
 which would illustrate and define this conception. 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 137 
 
 Once more, there are many remarkable descrip- 
 tions of natural scenery in his letters and his 
 diaries. These have been written with his eye on 
 the subject, and many at the very place, or on 
 the same day as that on which the things described 
 were seen. His memory, like Turner's, retained 
 them, and he used them in his poetry. It would 
 be well to collate and compare the passages in his 
 poems which have been directly taken from scenes 
 he has thus written down in his prose. And 
 the way he has heightened and cofnposed all the 
 detail that he saw into a picture, while retaining 
 truth to natural fact; and has woven the natural 
 scenery in and out with the human passions of 
 which he writes — as in the valley walk in Alastor—is 
 a matter of very pleasant and useful study. 
 
 And now to close this address. I hope I have 
 not been carried away, in defending Shelley, into 
 excessive praise of him. He has his own high 
 place, one of the great singers, and crowned with 
 his own crown, but he neither sits alone above the 
 rest of the solemn choir of poets, nor does he even 
 sit on a level with others whose range is greater, 
 who have presented to us in their poems a closer 
 image of human life and of the universe, imagina- 
 tively expressed with a passionate desire to penetrate 
 to the truth of them. 
 
 He is the poet of certain distinct human ideas 
 and of their corresponding emotions, and these ideas 
 are not many ; but within their several realms his 
 work has extraordinary intensity, subtle beauty, 
 
138 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 passionate impulse, and creative power. That 
 work, though its substance is grave and weighty, 
 is often too idealised into a world of woven dreams. 
 Substances were thinned out into shadowy expressions 
 of them, or seemed to disappear in a multitude of 
 fancies added to them ; but the substantial truths 
 were always steadfast behind the scaffolding or the 
 ornament. It was his way to do this. It was not 
 a weakness of capacity, but an inability to check the 
 outpouring of his thought. The substance of truth 
 is clear in the Prometheus Unbound^ but the expres- 
 sion of it is so multitudinous with imagery that 
 while we wonder and rejoice in it, we sometimes 
 wish our amazement were less, and our joy not so 
 overwhelming. On the other hand, in his personal 
 poetry Shelley wrote in the unsubstantial faery land 
 in which at least half of his inner life was passed. 
 The immaterial world was then his natural world, 
 not only fancifully but philosophically. When he 
 lived with nature, when he spoke of love, when he 
 voyaged with metaphysical ideas, he breathed with 
 ease that supersensuous air. The dreams he saw 
 were inspired by his own witch of Atlas. 
 
 On a poet's lips I slept 
 
 Dreaming like a love-adept 
 
 In the sound his breathing kept ; 
 
 Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, 
 
 But feeds on the aerial kisses 
 
 Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. 
 
 He will watch from dawn to gloom 
 
 The lake-reflected sun illume 
 
 The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 139 
 
 Nor heed nor see what things they be ; 
 But from these create he can 
 Forms more real than living man, 
 Nurslings of immortality ! 
 One of these awakened me, 
 And I sped to succour thee. 
 
 It is foolish to say that these dreams and these 
 subtle films of visionary thought are not subjects 
 for poetry. They form a great part of our life. 
 Even Wordsworth knew well what they were. 
 
 And I can listen to thee yet ; 
 Can lie upon the plain 
 And listen, till I do beget 
 That golden time again. 
 
 O blessed bird ! the earth we pace 
 Again appears to be 
 An unsubstantial, fairy place 
 That is fit home for thee. 
 
 And much of the pure passion of life must have 
 left us when we can no more read with pleasure the 
 lyrics in which Shelley clothed the shapes that haunted 
 the wildernesses of his thought. 
 
 It might perhaps have been better — supposing 
 that we could have got it without spoiling the man 
 and his art — if Shelley had considered oftener, in his 
 poetry concerning human matters, the ' nest upon the 
 dewy ground/ and not have so constantly sung high 
 up in the sky in a ' privacy of glorious light/ Yet, 
 there are many whom this pleases and whom it 
 impels. The heart which in spring loves to listen 
 to the lark lost to sight, better than it does to the 
 thrush singing of the loves of earth and of its 
 
I40 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 home upon the beech in the wood, is pleased with 
 Shelley more than with Wordsworth, and gains from 
 him what it does not gain from Wordsworth. And 
 those who like the thrush best have no right to 
 abuse those who love that song of the lark which, 
 as it mounts higher, fades away. It also is a song 
 in the soul of man. 
 
 Again, it may be that they who cry down Shelley 
 have lost the pleasure of looking for a golden year, 
 the hope of the redemption of man ; and in that 
 loss have ceased to feel the divine heat of anger with 
 the evils that beset and oppress mankind. They 
 are content to take the world as it comes, and to 
 meet its troubles day by day. These have their 
 place and do their work. But they ought to 
 tolerate those who are like Shelley, uncontent, 
 and whose uncontent makes them look forward 
 with unconquered hope to a new world, unsub- 
 stantial as yet save to the eye of faith ; men who 
 find in Shelley the expression of their indignation, 
 of their ideal, and of the kingdom of the great 
 Three who abide for man, Faith, Hope, and 
 Love. And if the song be as yet called Utopian, 
 if it be clothed in visions like those of the Apoca- 
 lypse, it does not follow that it has not a living 
 and a serious subject-matter. It is a subject-matter 
 which few great poets have not sustained and 
 adorned. It engaged the ancient prophets, it 
 belonged to Jesus Christ, it was sung by Virgil. 
 Neither Dante nor Milton disdained the thoughts 
 and the emotions of the restitution of all things. 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 141 
 
 For myself, I wish that subject-matter were 
 always before the hopes and in the hearts of men. 
 I wish the faith in it were as strong in the lives of 
 present men as it was in the life of Shelley. The 
 life of the poor would then be brighter, and their 
 endurance of the iniquity of society easier. Hope 
 would create from its own wreck the thing it con- 
 templates.^ A more spiritual life would balance 
 our materialism. The making of wealth and com- 
 fort would be less the religion of England. The 
 idleness and worldliness of man would be more 
 shamed into work and into simplicity. It is the 
 nature of a great faith and hope to make life 
 simple. Philosophy would be less narrow, science 
 less insolent, scepticism less vain, and that opinion 
 — the ultimate result of having neither faith nor 
 hope nor love — * that this world is the worst pos- 
 sible world,' cease to be the last refuge and the last 
 repose for the heart of man. 
 
 Were society to alter, as it must soon alter or 
 disintegrate, away from this condition, and live 
 more in the hopes, and with the aims, and in the 
 simple life of Shelley ; and along with these possess 
 also his sanity of view, it would then understand 
 how curiously foolish it is to call him ^ a beautiful, 
 but ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous 
 wings in vain.' Towards that social change his 
 work in poetry concerning man is one element of 
 power ; and it moves far more strongly than is 
 believed among the numerous body in the ' working 
 classes ' who think and feel concerning the condition 
 
142 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 of humanity. It is not ineiFectual. There are those, 
 and too many of them sometimes for our patience, 
 who receive Shelley and extol him as an exquisite 
 lyrist, but who, thinking only of their secluded and 
 exclusive palace of art, have no sympathy with the 
 ideal hopes for man which Shelley cherished, and 
 who, in the midst of their formulated and fading 
 culture whose main characteristics are the absence 
 of a social conscience and the absence of any love of 
 man, imagine that they represent the leading thoughts 
 and the fine spirit of humanity. There are others, 
 not quite so conceited or so futile as those folk, who 
 think that the Welt-Geist vaoYts most vividly, most 
 effectually, in the educated part of society. I do 
 not think that their opinion is true ; nor indeed 
 has history testified to the truth of that opinion, 
 but to the very contrary. The life of the World- 
 Spirit, as it energises now in England, is most 
 vivid in the ideas, hopes, dreams, and passionate 
 feelings which, unformed, are yet taking form in 
 the poor, the overworked, the oppressed ; in the 
 rude brains, and the emotional thoughts of the 
 steadfast, struggling workers of this country — those 
 who never despair though they have every reason 
 to despair, who fight on against overwhelming odds, 
 and die content because they believe in the coming 
 into reality of their ideal ; many of whom have 
 not where to lay their head, who are despised and 
 rejected of men, and acquainted with grief, those of 
 whom it may be said — ^ How know these men 
 letters, having never learned } ' These, as they 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SHELLEY SOCIETY 143 
 
 slowly weave their conceptions into form, love 
 Shelley and find in him their poet, and perhaps their 
 priest. If men wish to be in the forefront of the 
 future, to live in the ideas which will, a century 
 hence, rule the world, hi them live among the 
 men who are indignant, and who hope, with Shelley ; 
 who have his faith, who hear the trumpet of a 
 prophecy, and whose cry day and night is this : 
 
 O Wind, 
 If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind ? 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 
 
 There have been few men who were more swiftly 
 led away by impulse than Shelley. He was im- 
 pelled from within by his own thoughts, and they 
 immediately swept him away into the emotions 
 which belonged to them ; and in these emotions he ) 
 all but forgot the thoughts from which they took ( 
 their rise. This is the genesis of a number of his > 
 lyrics, and of a number of the errors he made in 
 life. 
 
 He was also impelled from without by impressions 
 made on him by the loveliness of nature, or by the 
 eviljo£^e_g^ood of man ; and these impressions 
 were at once hurried by his temperament into an 
 extremity of feeling which was translated, white-hot, 
 into poetry which for the most part was lyrical, or 
 verged on the lyrical. It is in the lyrical region 
 that the poetry was written which gives him a speciaL 
 place among the masters. 
 
 If we think of the longer poems, we may say 
 that the Prometheus Unbound is more of a Titanic 
 jyric than a dra ma ; half of it might be called a 
 congeries of lyrics. The Witch of Atlas^ Adonais^ 
 are not lyrics, but they share in the nature of a 
 
 U4 ^ 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 145 
 
 lyric. Alastor^ beyond the descriptions of nature 
 which are fitted, as it were by an afterthought, to the 
 moods of the wandering poet, is lyrical in its unity of 
 emotion, in that high mournful note which slowly 
 rises, then races upwards, culminates and falls. 
 Hellas is worth little as long as it tries to be dramatic, 
 but pure lyrics burst out of it like fountains. Ept- 
 psychidion is not a lyric, but is like a lyric expanded 
 into a poem. Its emotion is one ; its subject is 
 one ; and its intensity of expression is equal to its 
 emotion. It, too, but much more passionately than 
 Alastor^ rises, rushes on, culminates, falls and dies 
 breathless with its own passion, exactly like a lyric. 
 "Hhe Cenci stands alone. It is pure drama. In it 
 Shelley has carefully, for the sake of the dramatic 
 ideal, repressed, subdued his impetuous tendency to 
 lyrical expression. As to the 'Triumph of Life^ no 
 one can say what that poem would have become. 
 
 The other long poems — the social and contro- 
 versial poems — ^ueen Mah^ The Revolt of Islam^ 
 Rosalind and Helen^ are broken, unequal, disunited 
 work; and Julian and Maddalo^ though praise has 
 been lavished on it, has always seemed to me un- 
 fortunately prosaic. They have splendid passages, 
 where the poetic emotion has either mastered the 
 ill-composed form in which the poem is cast, or where 
 the form is wholly abandoned, but these passages are 
 too ardent and lovely for the rest of the poem. They 
 almost annihilate the rest of the poem. They alone 
 remain on the mind. They are of Shelley's inmost 
 nature, and I hear, far oiF, the lyrical cry in them. 
 
146 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 This Is one half of his poetry, and with this we 
 have nothing more to do. The other half is, with 
 a few exceptions, made up of pure lyrics ; and I will 
 dwell on some of their characteristics on which I 
 have not already elsewhere written. 
 
 The lyric proper is the product of a swift, momen- 
 tary, and passionate impulse, coming from without 
 for the most part, suddenly awaking the poet, as it 
 were out of a dream, into vivid life, seizing upon 
 him, and setting him on fire with its grasp, until he 
 believes it is his very self which speaks — replacing, 
 that is, the poet's own life by the life of the impulse, 
 until the impulse has absorbed in him everything 
 else but itself ; and bringing with it the form it has 
 to take, so that the whole poem leaps into being 
 before it is written down. When a lyric rises into 
 form in a great poet, it is always in fire that it rises. 
 But the temperament of the poet conditions the 
 mode of the fire. It is for the most part a short- 
 lived fire, but it burns more quietly in some, as in 
 Wordsworth ; more hotly in others, as in Byron ; 
 with every kind of intensity in various poets. In 
 Shelle y it burns slowly for a^time,- then_ flares to 
 heaven m "a rush of flame, then sinks and dies 
 as swiftly as it flamed. It is as momentary as a 
 meteor in him, and its substance is vaporised by its 
 own heat. 
 
 ^ As such it will have a limijted but an unbroken 
 unity. One emotion only, one thought only, will 
 dominate it, though naturally it will have changes ; 
 varied representations of this one thing, many 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 147 
 
 branches from one root, gradations of colour in 
 the same water, different tones in the one voice. 
 Shelley is supreme in changes wrought into one 
 theme. 
 
 Having this single-eyed unity, the lyric proper 
 will be simple in form and ornament. Many lyric 
 poets lose the natural simplicity of the lyric by 
 over-ornament. They make their poem flamboyant ; 
 adorn it from the outside, like some Renaissance 
 palaces, with garlands of thoughts and emotions 
 which have no clear relation to the subject, and 
 which destroy its proportion. The reason of that 
 is that the original impulse has either not been 
 intense enough, or the fire of emotion not hot 
 enough, or that as he writes the poet has grown 
 chill. When ce p assion is intense enough, it burns 
 up the needless, it attains simplicity. There is no- 
 thing so simple intETworld as puce passion ; not 
 only of love, but of hate and hope and melancholy, 
 despair and jealousy and joy. Any one of these, 
 at white heat, becomes simple. The too-much, 
 either in ornament or thought, cannot live in passion. 
 It rejects as it moves all that is weak or useless. 
 
 Shelley comes nearer t o the fiery, swift^et simple 
 form of theTyric than any modern poet. He is 
 rarely led away into ornament which overweights 
 his poem, but he sometimes Is. For example, I 
 wish in the ode To a Skylark all these comparisons 
 of the lark's song to a poet hidden In the light of 
 thought, to a high-born maiden in a palace tower, 
 to a glow-worm golden in a dell of dew, to a rose 
 
148 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 embowered in its leaves, were blown away to all the 
 winds, or at least embodied in another lyric where 
 they might fit the single passion of the theme. They 
 are flamboyant, and every one, instead of bringing us 
 closer to the lark in the heavens, separates us from 
 his singing. But, on the whole, no one except 
 Burns among the modern poets is nearer than 
 Shelley to the pure lyric — that thing so rare and 
 beautiful that all the world when it hears its cry 
 is hushed in delight. 
 
 Perhaps it was his life in Italy which ministered 
 to this power. In England, nature and the passionate 
 moments of human feeling slowly make their way 
 into the heart, and though the climax of them is 
 swift, shortlived, and simple in the lyrics of the 
 great poets, yet the original movement has not been 
 rushing, and the fulness of the passionate impulse is 
 not always reached. But in Italy, in the warm and 
 living air both of nature and man, impulses come in 
 a flashing light and glow, and while they last pulsate 
 like the colour-changing lightning of Italian nights. 
 Shelley was Italian in this, and his lyrics have the 
 rush and impetuosity of the south. 
 
 Then, who that has an ear for rhythm is not 
 delighted with the musical changes of his lyrics? 
 Every lyric ought to bring with it its isolated 
 music, and to be alone in that, but the varied 
 changes of the one emotion, the one theme, should 
 have each its own subtle and natural expression. In 
 these and the full music of the whole poem, Shelley's 
 excellence is as easy as it is instinctive — nay, in its 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 149 
 
 instinctiveness, in Its Inevitable vibration of rhythm 
 in harmony with the vibration of emotion^ is the 
 chief loveliness of Shelley's lyrical music. 
 
 These are general considerations of Shelley's 
 lyric work. It is time to turn to the particulars 
 in it which distinguish it from the lyric work of 
 other poets. 
 
 Of what kind, we ask, were his lyrics of nature ? 
 His impassioned treatment of nature in his short 
 poems varied according to the mood he was in. 
 Sometimes he saw nature as one and indivisible ; as 
 a spiritual being who through all her forms, while she 
 remained inconceivable love and unity, ' spreads un- 
 divided, operates unspent ' — and the Hymn to Asia 
 — ' Life of Life, thy lips enkindle ' — is an example 
 of this mood with nature^ If a great physicist, 
 having for many days meditated on the myriad 
 life in nature, upbuilding itself, from its appa- 
 rently inorganic movement in matter into worlds 
 out of mists of fire, to its inconceivably various 
 vegetable, animal, and human organisms arising out 
 of a single cell ; and having thus meditated, should 
 then pass on in his thought to be momentarily 
 conscious of himself as the centre of this im- 
 measurable life of the universe and of its passionate 
 will to live — if then he should fall asleep, and 
 passing in a dream from the scientific into the 
 imaginative world, should realise as a personality 
 the source of this universal life, and realise it as 
 feminine — the Alma Venus, the warm generative 
 
150 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 principle — he would in his dream be impelled to 
 make for her exactly the song that Shelley made 
 for Asia. It is a wonderful thing. The soul, the 
 passion of the imaginative physicist is in it. 
 
 That is one form in which Shelley's lyric con- 
 templation of nature appeared. There are other 
 lyrics which look on nature, not as one Being, but 
 as many beings ; in which every natural object or 
 phenomenon has its own life, and acts and thinks 
 and plays like a man or a child, without any con- 
 science or self-consciousness ; in which nature, that 
 is, is seen as the men of the mythical periods saw 
 her. 
 
 In the ancient myths the doings of nature, and 
 especially of the sky, are impersonated and described 
 as the doings of men or animals. The dawn is said 
 to fly before the rising sun. The summer-god 
 contends with and conquers the winter and is con- 
 quered in turn by the winter giants. The rays of 
 the sun are the arrows of the sun-god. The great 
 elongated globes of the rain-cloud hanging down 
 with their weight of water are the distended udders 
 of the cows of Indra. Such mythical representations 
 have passed into all our poetry, even into our daily 
 speech. But they exist in it chiefly in the form of 
 adjectives, or in certain well-known images which 
 science has never induced us to surrender. But we 
 make no new myths. These impersonations of the 
 doings of nature live no longer in the faith of 
 reason. It is therefore with some wonder and 
 much pleasure that in Shelley we find ourselves with 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 151 
 
 a poet who was so detached from both the present 
 and the past as to be frequently in the very position 
 of mind in which an early Aryan thought ; and 
 therefore to be able to make new nature-myths 
 of his own ; to feel nature, and to see her doings as 
 a child who belonged to the childhood of the world. 
 Goethe now and then fixed himself in that position, 
 and made a myth or two, but he did it consciously 
 \ and even laboriously. Shelley did it quite naturally,. 
 
 \ exactly as a man a hundred thousand years ago might 
 have done it. The only difference, a difference he 
 could not help, was in the artistic shape of the thing 
 done. This is a thing extraordinarily rare; it is 
 even rare in Shelley himself. Pure specimens of it 
 would occur oftener if Shelley had not also had a 
 
 J metaphysical theory of the universe which led him to 
 say that the whole world was the apparent form of 
 supreme Love and Thought ; led him, that is, to 
 express and think that theory at intervals, for he 
 was far too changing to hold any theory of that 
 kind for long. When he felt it, he could not of 
 course make a nature-myth. Any kind of pantheism 
 excludes the imagery of the occurrences of nature by 
 the action of persons or animals. But when Shelley 
 felt especially the child and was bored by his meta- 
 physic, he being of the momentary momentary, and 
 delighted with a change of view, and pleased like a 
 Greek to give life to everything, became almost as 
 young as the earlier world, and made new nature- 
 myths, like the young heathen that he was. We 
 have them, not quite simple, not fully shaped, in 
 
152 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 separate lines. Here is an early and imperfect 
 example : 
 
 Twilight, ascending slowly from the east, 
 ^-^ ' Entwined in duskier wreaths her braided locks 
 
 JLhC On the fair front and radiant eyes of day. 
 
 That has not the inevitable childishness of a nature- 
 myth, it is too elaborate, nor is it alive enough or 
 direct enough. 
 Here if another : 
 
 Old winter has gone 
 
 In his weakness back to the mountains hoar, 
 
 and another poem takes up again that winter and 
 summer myth which we meet everywhere ; but that 
 is not a new myth, not of his own making. He 
 creates the Winter with a northern vigour in The 
 Sensitive Plant. Thor himself would not have dis- 
 dained to meet this Frost-Giant who tears the 
 cataracts from the hills and hangs them to his girdle. 
 Then there is the poem about the Apennine. It is a 
 mountain dim and grey in the daylight, but at night, 
 when the storm comes, it rises from its place and 
 walks abroad. There is a myth half made. At night 
 it is a true being, but Shelley's modern consciousness 
 denies the life of the mountain by day. Then there 
 is the impersonation in the Prometheus of the earth 
 and of the moon. The earth, asleep in the midst 
 of a whirling sphere of crystal, itself built up of ttn 
 thousand orbs involving and involved ; the descrip- 
 tion of what is seen within the sphere, and what the 
 beams which shoot from the stars on the brow of 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 153 
 
 the earth reveal of all the secrets of the earth — is 
 not mythical, but physical and metaphysical imagina- 
 tion. But the image of the moon is nature-myth ; 
 every touch is made out of the doings of nature. 
 Within the chariot 
 
 sits a wingM infant, white 
 Its countenance, like the whiteness of bright snow, 
 Its plumes are as feathers of sunny frost. 
 Its limbs gleam white, through the wind-flowing folds 
 Of its white robe, woof of ethereal pearl. 
 Its hair is white, the brightness of white light 
 Scattered in strings ; yet its two eyes are heavens 
 Of liquid darkness, which the Deity 
 Within seems pouring, as a storm is poured 
 From jaggM clouds, out of their arrowy lashes. 
 Tempering the cold and radiant air around. 
 With fire that is not brightness ; in its hand 
 It sways a quivering moonbeam, from whose point 
 A guiding power directs the chariot's prow 
 Over its wheeled clouds, which as they roll 
 Over the grass, and flowers, and waves, wake sounds, 
 Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew. 
 
 This might be written of the moon-god in India. 
 
 Still, in this there are so many comparisons, Mike 
 this, like that,' that we see the poet was not quite 
 unconscious of what he was doing, as an early man 
 would have been, who would have said more directly 
 what he thought. When we get to a line like this, 
 however, we get almost to the early directness. 
 The clouds are sheep that pass through the sky 
 
 Shepherded by the slow unwilling wind. 
 
 And when we get to this little lyric we meet the 
 
154 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 pure simple thing, and the new thing, an actual 
 fresh-minded myth in the nineteenth century : 
 
 The pale stars are gone ! 
 For the Sun, their swift shepherd, 
 To their folds them compelling. 
 In the depths of the dawn. 
 Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and they flee 
 Beyond his blue dwelling. 
 As fawns flee the leopard. 
 
 The last three lines disturb the image, but the first 
 four are pure myth, and so is this : 
 
 And the young and dewy Dawn 
 
 Bold as an unhunted fawn 
 
 Up the windless Heaven is gone. 
 
 And among them — the most astonishing of all — is 
 The Cloud, It is not only a myth of the Cloud ; 
 the cloud is accompanied by a host of other imper- 
 sonations of nature — the sanguine sunrise with his 
 meteor eyes, the orbM maiden of the moon, the 
 imprisoned giant of the thunder, the lightning 
 which runs through the sky to find his love, — all are 
 touched into life, and yet there is not one phrase, 
 not one adjective which is contradictory of, or which 
 does not illuminate, naturaiikct*-'-- 
 
 These examples would not perhaps be enough to 
 prove my statement, were there not so many of the 
 half-and-half myths of which I have instanced one. 
 The Hymn of Apollo is one of these. The sleepless 
 Hours watch the dreaming God. Their mother, the 
 Gray Dawn, warns them to awaken him when the 
 Moon is gone. He rises and walks over the moun- 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 155 
 
 tains and the waves, he leaves his robe on the sea, his 
 footsteps pave the clouds with fire, the Earth is his 
 mistress whom he embraces, he feeds the clouds and 
 flowers with their colours ; and all the light of the 
 universe, from the pure stars to the lamps of earth, 
 are portions of his power ; he stands on the peak 
 of Heaven, he wanders down with unwilling steps 
 into the clouds of even. All that is pure nature- 
 myth, and it is not borrowed. It is fresh work 
 done freshly by this ancient youth. 
 
 But in the very same poem we are brought 
 into that later stage of human thought when the 
 natural myth was moralised, when the personages 
 were made gods, and the gods the sources of morality 
 and the inventors of beauty. We are in that world 
 when we read 
 
 The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill 
 Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day : 
 ♦ All men who do or even imagine ill 
 
 Fly me, and from the glory of my ray 
 Good minds and open actions take new might, 
 Until diminished by the reign of Night. 
 
 So also, when we come to the last verse, and the 
 sun becomes the lord of science and beauty, and 
 both are at one in him ; and he, feeling their 
 eternal harmony, and that they are harmony, re- 
 joices in his own being in the universe — we have 
 passed into that further world where a million myths 
 of nature which predicated a million separate lives 
 in every one of the million things to which the 
 mythical imagination gave life, have become one im- 
 
IS6 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 measurable life. Unity fills our imagination of the 
 Sun-Godhead instead of diversity, yet diversity is not 
 lost, but secured. And more, not only nature but 
 all the work of man is taken up into the one, 
 universal life. 
 
 I am the eye with which the Universe 
 Beholds itself and knows itself divine ; 
 
 All harmony of instrument and verse, 
 All prophecy, all medicine is mine. 
 
 All light of art or nature ; to my song 
 
 Victory and praise in its own right belong. 
 
 This lyric is, then, a concentration of two ages of 
 human thought concerning nature. Nay, it is a 
 short record of the progress of human thought 
 from the mythical to the philosophical conception 
 of nature. 
 
 At other times Shelley sees and describes things in 
 nature as they are in themselves, as they were before 
 myth-making man was born into the universe — and 
 as he describes, he himself is wholly detached from 
 them. It is true, he makes them alive. It is no dead 
 matter which is working, but living powers, doing 
 the things that please them ; and we may think that 
 Shelley has imposed on material things his own life. 
 But that was not his intention. He really believed 
 that the cloud and the stream and the flower and 
 the sea, even the cell, were alive, had the will to live, 
 and worked for this, and played as they worked ; 
 and the trend of the latest philosophy of the uni- 
 verse is not far apart from this belief of his. At 
 any rate, he alone among the poets could see natural 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 157 
 
 things, and chose sometimes to see them, as they 
 were in themselves, wholly independent of our 
 thought or feeling ; and he made poems on this 
 vision of them. Not one suspicion of humanity 
 belongs to them, not one word brings into them 
 a shred of human feeling. For that reason, while 
 we admire them, we do not love them, but their 
 uniqueness and their strangeness is astonishing. Of 
 these poems ne Cloud is the most finished example. 
 I have mentioned it as an instance of his myth- 
 making power. But in that case it ought to have 
 some relation to humanity, and indeed, when the 
 poem is more fully considered, the personages in it 
 have no such relation. They are alive ; that is all 
 the connection they have with us. They are purely 
 elemental. The sanguine sunrise, the meteor moon, 
 the thunder in the caves of earth, the march of the 
 clouds through the rainbow arch, the clouds -building 
 and upbuilding themselves in the air and laughing at 
 their own tricks — it may all have occurred, and did 
 occur, in the Silurian period. More than half of it 
 is even true of the doings of the Fire-mist out of 
 which the solar system grew. Not one phrase takes 
 us away from that illusion. There is not a word of 
 human interest, not even a word which brings the 
 poet himself into any relation with the object de- 
 scribed. We are not conscious of Shelley at all as 
 we read The Cloud, 
 
 This is a power which, as exercised by Shelley, 
 belongs to him alone among the poets. There are 
 few who can escape from their own seif-conscious- 
 
158 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 ness or from the overwhelming consciousness of 
 the world of humanity. Shelley, on the contrary, 
 
 ; could strip himself clean of humanity and of Shelley, 
 and move among the elements like one of them- 
 selves. Hence there arises, as I have said else- 
 where, this curious thing, that describing natural 
 occurrences as if they were the doings of living 
 things, and describing them in terms of the highest 
 imagination, he yet, because he has wholly got rid 
 of the deceiving mist of human emotion and thought 
 concerning them, describes them with an accuracy 
 which we might almost call scientific. "The Cloud 
 
 , might be lectured upon by a meteorologist. So 
 j might this little passage describing the fate of a 
 globe of dew, from dawn to sunset. 
 
 As the dissolving warrnth of dawn may fold 
 A half unfrozen dew-globe, green and gold, 
 And crystalline, till it becomes a winged mist 
 And wanders up the vault of the blue day. 
 Outlives the noon, and on the sun's last ray 
 Hangs o'er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst. 
 
 That is pure science in lovely verse. But Shelley 
 elsewhere takes the same operation of nature and 
 treats it in the mythical way, giving to every globe 
 of vapour its own life, and mingling their life up 
 with the life of the spirits who make music in the 
 woods — so changing were his poetic moods. Here, 
 the Faun in the Prometheus speaks : 
 
 I have heard those more skilled in spirits say, 
 The bubbles, which the enchantment of the sun 
 Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave 
 The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools. 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 159 
 
 Are the pavilions where such dwell and float 
 Under the green and golden atmosphere 
 Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves ; 
 And when these burst, and the thin fiery air, 
 The which they breathed within those lucent domes, 
 Ascends to flow like meteors through the night. 
 They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed, 
 And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire 
 Under the waters of the earth again. 
 
 These two powers — the power of making fresh 
 myths out of nature, and that of describing nature 
 imaginatively and yet with scientific truth, are but 
 two examples of separate powers which other poets, 
 more limited by conventions of thought, can scarcely 
 be said to possess, or if they possess, to use. It is 
 the existence of these distinct capacities which, as 
 we read Shelley, continually brings us into strange 
 and unaccustomed worlds of thought and emotion. 
 Then, translated into these unknown and delightful 
 realms, we are enchanted — if we can see them. 
 
 It may be said that such representations of nature 
 are one-sided representations. A poet ought to be 
 able to represent nature and humanity in their 
 mutual questions and replies, and to make imagi- 
 native the various theories of their relations. It 
 is true ; but I have dwelt here only on what was 
 unique in Shelley's imaging of nature. He can do 
 the ordinary business as well as any other poet of 
 his century and, like each of them, with a difference 
 of his own. There^ are many poems founded on 
 theoretic conceptions of nature, first as the formx 
 which intellectual beauty (that is, our idea of the 
 
i6o STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 beauty that exists in the intellect of the whole) 
 takes ; and secondly, as the living and breathing 
 image, in a million lovely shapes, of all-sustaining, 
 all-kindling love. There are also a crowd of lyrics 
 in which nature and man are clasped together like 
 the hands of two lovers. There are other poems in 
 which nature and her life are made the source of 
 reflections on human life. There are descriptions 
 of nature which gradually lead up to one great image 
 in which is embodied a generalisation of a great 
 crisis in human history. I take one, a well-known 
 passage : 
 
 Hark ! the rushing snow ! 
 The sun-awakened avalanche ! whose mass, 
 Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there 
 Flake after flake, in heaven-defying minds 
 As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth 
 Is loosened, and the nations echo round. 
 Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now. 
 
 With regard, then, to Shelley's poetry of nature, 
 and of nature and man, there are, first, only a few 
 strings of the great harp of nature and man, the 
 strings of which are made of the fibres of the 
 human heart, and the sounding wood of which is 
 nature herself, on which Shelley does not play with 
 ease. And secondly, with regard to nature alone, 
 there are strings of her lonely harp on which no one 
 has ever played but himself, strings whose vibration 
 is so high and shrill and faint to the human ear 
 that there are few who hear their music aright. 
 That double statement is my contention. 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY i6i 
 
 When we leave the lyrics which concern nature, 
 and nature and man, we come to those which are 
 concerned only with human life^ with its passion and 
 its thought. It is not possible, in a short essay 
 like this, to treat of these with the fullness they 
 deserve, or to give examples of their several 
 kinds. I can only isolate and distinguish a few 
 of them. 
 
 There are, first, those that^embody his passing 
 personal impressions with regard to human life, of 
 whicir^there are some sTFange utterances. The 
 general spirit which informs their diverse moods is, 
 however, collected into one thought in the "Triumph 
 of Life^ the last poem he wrote, where he describes 
 the overthrow by life of all the aspirations, joys, 
 and work of men. The inexorable destruction of 
 humanity by its own life is the subject of that poem, 
 a poem modern in its pessimism, but from which 
 Shelley would, had he lived, have freed himself, as he 
 has already begun to do at the close of that fragment. 
 That motive, however, is the impulse of a number 
 of lyrics. 
 
 Again, there are all the love lyrics, and a curious 
 revelation they are of the ever-changing, indifferent, 
 indefinite character of his passion, which fled from its 
 fulfilment as if it were an enemy who would rob 
 him of all joy since it robbed him of pursuit and 
 limited the illimitable. On these and on their 
 temper I have already dwelt in the Introduction I 
 wrote to the Selections from Shelley} 
 
 1 Golden Treasury Series. Macmillan and Co. 
 L 
 
i62 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 What I have not said in that Introduction is 
 that there are a whole class of Shelley's lyrics which 
 defy analysis ; which purposely darken and blur the 
 outlines of thought and emotion whenever those 
 oudines tend to become clear ; which laugh at method ; 
 which, when we think we catch their meaning, glide 
 into something else, leaving the thought we seemed 
 to attain unfinished ; in which nothing is finished ; 
 but which, all the same, lea ve a vivid impression 
 behind them of the state of Shelley's feeling, and are 
 representative of those worlds of feeling of which 
 we are often conscious, but which, being like vapour 
 incessantly involved and never remaining the same 
 for a single instant, we can never realise, These 
 answer to the things which the impressionist school of 
 painters endeavour to produce, and, when a genius is 
 at work, succeed in producing. Here is one verse : 
 
 There is regret, almost remorse, 
 
 For Time long past. 
 'Tis like a child's belovM corse 
 A father watches, till at last 
 Beauty is like remembrance, cast 
 
 From Time long past. 
 
 And who is to explain or bring into either 
 emotional or intellectual consideration the long lyric 
 of the Witch of Atlas ? It belongs to a world in 
 which thought seeks no end, and no emotion has 
 ever time to feel itself because another emotion 
 instantly overtakes it. It is made up of the thou- 
 sand thousand impulses and imaginations Shelley had 
 received and sheltered from moment to moment, 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 163 
 
 while he wandered among the mountains, glens, and 
 streams near Pisa and Lucca. He flung them all 
 around the person of his Witch, and knitted them 
 into a poem as indefinite, as fantastic, as aerial as she, 
 and as enchanting. It stands alone in poetry. Men 
 who seek its meaning will give it a hundred different 
 meanings ; but it has no special meaning. It is the 
 joyous, unchartered dancing of Shelley's soul in the 
 elfin world where, when he pleased, he lived. It is 
 not serious, the critics say, it is not a criticism of 
 life. Yet it will be read with pleasure a thousand 
 years hence, and will satisfy a certain not uncommon 
 mood of constant humanity. 
 
 Then there are all the lyrics of liberty and hope 
 for the po or and the oppr essed. Some of these are 
 so^'wntten that in them also Shelley stands some- 
 what alone among English poets. Only a few, 
 like Ebenezer Elliott, have written poems like the 
 Address to the Men of England^ like the Masque of 
 Anarchy^ on events in the social struggle at the time 
 of the events, and on the side of the people against 
 its oppressors. Other poets have generalised on the 
 past : they have written about battles in which the 
 glory of England is displayed ; they have written 
 against the foreigner, if he were at war with us ; 
 but they have not gone direct to the quick, as 
 Shelley did with a sacred indignation. They have 
 not written ~ against the powerful with a careless 
 courage, nor pierced into the heart of that struggle 
 of the poor for a good and happy life which is the 
 great war of the world, not only in England, but in 
 
i64 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 every modern nation. Shelley sympathised with 
 that strife when other poets despised or ignored it, 
 and his songs upon it, few as they are, might be 
 sung to-day, when the battle has deepened into 
 organised war. 
 
 The cry of these lyrics which had to do with the 
 present was completed by lyrics which celebrated the 
 hopes of the future, and by others which described 
 the happier world to come. This was one of the 
 main regions of his longer poems, from the ill-knit 
 work of ^een Mab and the Revolt of Islam to the 
 magnificent restitution of man and nature in the 
 Prometheus Unbound. If we were audacious we 
 might rank that poem among lyrics. It is like a 
 lyric written in a larger world than ours, on a 
 mighty scale, for a universal music, by a great 
 Archangel ; by Raphael who in his glory still com- 
 passionates the earth. 
 
 The Ode to Liberty^ in its large imaginative grasp 
 of the story of human freedom, passes from the days 
 of savagery to the various kinds of liberty which 
 Athens and Rome, England and Italy, Luther, Milton, 
 and the French Revolution, gave to the world, 
 and from them, with a fierce denunciation of kings 
 and priests, to the praise of perfect Freedom — free- 
 dom that never can remain freedom, unless it bring 
 with it, as comrades and assessors. Wisdom and 
 Love and Justice and the Fame ' of what has been, 
 the Hope of what will be.' 
 
 The Ode to Naples is born of the same spirit, but 
 is confined to freedom in Italy ; and as he wrote. 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 165 
 
 the spirit of beauty, the child of profound love, 
 which Shelley felt moving through every grain of 
 Italian earth, through every cell of Italian air, is 
 mingled up with the spirit of liberty. Its main cry 
 is that without freedom no beauty can be seen, and 
 none worshipped. 
 
 These odes ar e goo d, but th gy are over-elabora ted. 
 They are passionat e, but their passion is not..^ lways 
 natural^ They have the air of being schemed 
 beforehand, even of being written to order. But 
 theriT'nearly'^ailr'odes seem to share in these, faults. 
 The form of the ode seems to suggest them. It is, 
 on the whole — except perhaps in Keats — the least 
 satisfactory of lyric forms. 
 
 The songs in Hellas are of a finer quality, and 
 they mingle up with their cry for liberty noble 
 aspiration towards a iiew-created world and un- 
 flinching hopeJbr its advent. It is a hope he never 
 quite surrendered, even in "the last years ; and its 
 most lofty and clarion note is in the prophetic music 
 of the Ode to the West Wind, And for this prophecy 
 which our modern. poets are too sad, too weary with 
 themselves, to touch with any apocalyptic fervour, 
 too conscious of the trouble and confusion in which 
 they live to write of with any joy, we give Shelley 
 an incessant gratitude. 
 
 With the songs in Hellas the prophetic element 
 in the lyrics of Shelley is no more. The personal 
 element now becomes supreme. His hopes for 
 man, his faith in the coming of a just and love-ruled 
 world seem to have faded into weariness. The 
 
1 66 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 greater part of Hellas is apathetic work, lashed into 
 a false excitement. A few of the choruses and of 
 the songs, especially the beautiful verses at the close ; 
 the little piece of Shelley's philosophic views of the 
 universe which Ahasuerus delivers to the Sultan, to 
 his humorous confusion — are true and vital forms 
 of Shelley's thoughts and emotion. The rest is un- 
 worthy of his powers. He passed from them in 
 1822 into purely personal lyrics, and on these I 
 have elsewhere already written. 
 
 Finally, I should like to dwell on the unconscious 
 logic in arrangement of some of Shelley's lyrics. I 
 have said of a certain class of them that they have 
 little clearness or method, or continuity of thought 
 or emotion. They wander and drift, as it were, with- 
 out an aim. But with others, and those the best, it 
 is not so, but the very contrary. They have a logical 
 arrangement of their own. This is not so uncommon 
 a thing in poetry as those imagine who think that 
 the poet, driven by a kind of divine mania beyond 
 himself, works without knowing where he is going 
 or how he will get to the end. There is a logic of 
 emotion as well as of thought, and though it does 
 produce itself without a previous scheme, it appears 
 when the lyric is done, and, if the poet have great 
 genius, in a clear order which may be subjected by 
 those who are not the poet himself to an analysis as 
 rigid as that to which we can subject a great musical 
 composition. The poet himself is indeed swept 
 away, but all throughout his torrent movement he 
 follows a course which is obedient to a develop- 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 167 
 
 ment of his emotion as natural and as orderly as a 
 process of nature. I think this is true with regard 
 to all the great lyrics of the world ; and it is true 
 especially of Shelley, because his intellect played so 
 large a part in the whole of his work. It was 
 accustomed to do close work, and when the emotion 
 was first, as it is in poetry, and carried him away, his 
 intellect, in rejoicing subordination, went with the 
 emotion, working in harmony with it and working 
 as a willing servant, so that the result, which was 
 fully emotional, possessed also an intellectual order. 
 I suggest one example in the little lyric — When the 
 Lamp is Shattered, The first verse uses four com- 
 parisons to illustrate the passing of love. These are 
 taken up and re-used in different ways throughout 
 the rest of the poem, as if they were four themes 
 which a musician brings in, at intervals, into the 
 main idea, in order to emphasise various forms of 
 its passion. It is a subtle weaving, but a reader, 
 similarly emotionalised as the poet, may pass easily 
 and clearly through its labyrinth. Such a logic of 
 emotion may be found throughout Epipsychidion^ 
 where metaphors seem to run riot. They are all 
 really held in hand. I give another instance- from 
 Alastor^ where Shelley is describing the dying frame 
 of the wanderer : 
 
 A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings 
 
 The breath of heaven did wander — a bright stream 
 
 Once fed with many-voiced waves — a dream 
 
 Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever. 
 
 Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now. 
 
i68 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 The last line takes up in its adjectives the three 
 illustrations. The lute is still, the stream is dark and 
 dry, the dream is unremembered. But the finest 
 example of this characteristic quality is the Ode to 
 the West Wtnd^ and though I do not like analysing 
 a poem any more than I care to dissect a flower, 
 yet for once, and to see Shelley's way, and as 
 conclusion and illustration of this essay, it may be 
 permitted. 
 
 He has been walking by the Arno, in the wood 
 which skirts it, among the fallen leaves, and has seen 
 the congregated clouds rising from the south-west to 
 usher in the yearly storm with which the autumnal 
 rains begin in October in Italy ; and the tempestuous 
 motion of the trees and the clouds awakens the tem- 
 pestuous passion of his heart, so easily raised, so 
 stormily uplifted, so transient when its power was 
 spent. Then the impulse from without and the 
 awakened impulse within, mingling in passionate 
 embrace, brought forth the poem. I can well 
 imagine the first lines leaping from his lips in a 
 moment — thought, emotion, metre, movement — all! 
 rushing together into a self-creation. 
 
 It begins with the West Wind rushing through the 
 wood like a living river, and bearing with it the 
 dead leaves — yellow and black and hectic red — the 
 Destrgyer, the wild spirit who buries the deady But 
 with the dead leaves are also the winged seeds which 
 the wind too bears to their rest, where they may 
 quicken when Spring blows her clarion— -Preserver, 
 then, as well as Destroyer. 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 169 
 
 O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, 
 Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead 
 Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing. 
 
 Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red. 
 Pestilence-stricken multitudes ; O thou 
 Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 
 
 The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low. 
 Each like a corpse within its grave, until 
 Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow 
 
 Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 
 (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) 
 With living hues and odours plain and hill : 
 
 Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere ; 
 Destroyer and Preserver : hear, oh, hear ! 
 
 The same theme is repeated, with clear strange 
 changes, in the sky, then in the ocean, then in 
 Shelley's own heart, and then for the whole of man. 
 Nothing can be intellectually clearer than the order, 
 and yet the emotion is always the master, the lord 
 of the poem. Nay more, the images used in these 
 several repetitions are similar, though fresh images 
 are continually added. 
 
 He sees in the sky, where the storm is beginning, 
 the same things he has seen in the wood. Heaven, 
 and ocean from whose bosom all the waters came, 
 are now the great forest through which the wind is 
 sweeping like a broad and surging river. The sky, 
 before the huge mass of cloud brings with it the 
 steady wind, is full of rushing and separate avant- 
 couriers of small dark clouds, red and pale and 
 black, that fly over the sky. These are the leaves 
 
170 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 of this forest of the sky, and are shaken down 
 upon the stream and surge of the wind. That 
 image, then, and daring it is, is bound up with and 
 repeats the first verse. But Shelley, thrilled as he 
 looked by the splendour of the tempest, and driven 
 by his emotion to change the image that he might 
 better feel the passion of the hour and represent it 
 better, now sees the coming clouds like the pageant 
 of the burial of the year ; a vast and congregated 
 procession, to which night is the sepulchral dome, 
 and out of which black rain and fire and hail will 
 burst — new images of that which he originally 
 imaged as the black and red leaves of the wood. 
 Before this the loose clouds fly like Maenads, their 
 locks blown forward by the wind, and the wind 
 itself is the dirge of the year, the impersonated 
 sorrow of all that has been, but which it now 
 destroys. For in this verse that side of the West 
 Wind which makes it the Destroyer, and not the 
 Preserver, the God that slays rather than saves, is 
 given. 
 
 Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion, 
 Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, 
 Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, 
 
 Angels of rain and lightning : there are spread 
 
 On the blue surface of thine aery surge, 
 
 Like the bright hair upUfted from the head 
 
 f 
 Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge 
 
 Of the horizon to the zenith's height, 
 
 The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 171 
 
 Of the dying year, to which this closing night 
 Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, 
 Vaulted with all thy congregated might 
 
 Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere 
 
 Black rain and fire and hail will burst : oh, hear ! 
 
 But the next verse shows the West Wind as the 
 kindlier impetuosity of the universe. The theme 
 in the first verse of the wind as the Preserver, as 
 the giver of life, as life itself, is taken up. The 
 wind wakens now the blue Mediterranean, for we 
 have passed from the forest, from the wind on the 
 earth, from the~wmd in the sky, to the wind upon 
 the sea. He wakens the loveliness of the isles in 
 Baias's bay ; he disturbs the sleep of the waters in 
 which lay the old palaces and towers — freshly, 
 brightly disturbs them. Then the theme changes as 
 before : one picture is not enough for Shelley, nor 
 one aspect of his theme. We are swept back again 
 into the thought of the wind as Destroyer. From 
 the Mediterranean we are borne into the Atlantic, 
 and again the original image recurs. The sea itself is 
 like the forest. It cleaves itself into chasms before 
 the fierce stream of the wind. The woods of ocean, 
 the sea-blooms, and the sapless foliage grow grey 
 with fear, and tremble and despoil themselves. 
 
 Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams 
 The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 
 Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, 
 
172 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay ; 
 And saw in sleep old palaces and towers 
 Quivering within the wave's intenser day, 
 
 All overgrown with azure moss and flowers 
 
 So sweet, the sense faints picturing them 1 Thou 
 
 For whose path the Atlantic's level powers 
 
 Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below 
 The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear 
 The sapless foliage of the ocean, know 
 
 Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, 
 And tremble and despoil themselves : oh, hear ! 
 
 Then in the next verse, having finished with 
 earth and sky and sea, he takes up a side issue of 
 emotion, which has reference to himself — he who is 
 earth and sky and sea in one. Enthralled by the 
 swiftness and strength of the wind, he wishes to be 
 lifted and borne on the river of its strength. But 
 even then he does not forget to link this new issue 
 to the original theme. He takes up forest and sky 
 and ocean in his repeating way : If I were a dead 
 leaf thou mightest bear — If I were a swift cloud to 
 fly with thee — If I were a wave to share thy impulse 
 of thy strength — If I were even what I was when 
 young I seemed thy equal, scarce less swift than 
 thou — I would not be so full of prayer to thee ; but 
 I am as weak as thou art strong, O lift me — and 
 again knitting his thought into his emotion, not 
 letting us loose from the first theme, he repeats in 
 change the images : ' O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a 
 cloud.' 
 
 I know nothing of music, but if this is not like 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 173 
 
 the way a musician works his changes, I should be 
 surprised. 
 
 Then, lastly, he returns from this side issue to 
 the main emotion and the main image. He himself 
 is now the forest, his leaves are falling. They are 
 his thoughts, multitudes of which have withered and 
 died. Through him the wind is passing, the wind 
 of the universe, and it drives his thoughts along. 
 But as it passes it makes harmonies in him. He is 
 the lyre on which the wind plays. In that way he 
 describes how the poem arose, how all poems about 
 nature are born. There is nothing about destruc- 
 tion in this verse, but there is of waking and 
 kindling. The impetuosity and strength of the 
 wind — it is now a spiritual power of the universe 
 — has entirely since the last stanza quenched 
 in Shelley's mind the thought of the wind as a 
 Destroyer. That part of the theme is exhausted, 
 but the thought of the wind as the Preserver, 
 which was barely touched before, is dominant in 
 the last ; and Shelley, now at the very height of 
 passion and in full union with the tempest, which 
 is about to burst in rain and splendour, calls on 
 the wind to be himself, to drive with it his dead 
 thoughts — the winged seeds which are in them, as 
 germs are in the flying leaves of the wood, thus 
 recalling again the original image — to quicken a new 
 life in mankind. 
 
 Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is : 
 What if my leaves are falling like its own ! 
 The tumult of thy mighty harmonies 
 
174 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, 
 Sweet though in sadness. Be thou. Spirit fierce, 
 My Spirit ! Be thou me, impetuous one ! 
 
 Drive my dead thoughts over the Universe 
 Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth ! 
 
 But as before, uncontent with a single image, he 
 repeats the same thought in another image, still, 
 however, clinging close to the wind, and images an 
 unextinguished fire in his heart, each spark of which 
 is a thought. Over this fire the rushing wind 
 is blowing, and bears on its wings the living embers 
 to kindle fire in the souls of men. 
 
 And, by the incantation of this verse, 
 
 Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth 
 Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind ! 
 Be through my lips to unwakened earth 
 
 The trumpet of a prophecy ! 
 
 The last thought has now been reached, the last 
 realm over which the wind is sweeping. It has passed 
 through the forests of earth, through the clouds of 
 the sky, into the depths of ocean, through the woods 
 and sky and ocean of Shelley's heart ; and then, at 
 the very point and climax of emotion, it leaves him- 
 self and sweeps through all mankind, bearing away 
 with it dead things and the seeds of new. Out of 
 the personal Shelley passes into the universal, and 
 at that moment the future opened to him. Beyond 
 the storm, beyond the winter it ushers in, he sees 
 the new-awakened world, the birth of all the seeds, 
 the outburst as of a spring in hupianity ; 
 
THE LYRICS OF SHELLEY 175 
 
 O Wind, 
 If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind r 
 
 This Is the lyric of lyrics. It is the hymn of our 
 own world. It ought to be set to music by a 
 great musician, but he should have the genius 
 of Beethoven. ' Ineffectual Angel ! ' indeed ; nay 
 rather, impassionating Angel ! 
 
 Of TH£ 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 Of 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION^ 
 
 The charm which belongs to Shelley, and the delight 
 which a great poem kindles in the heart of man, have 
 made Emilia Viviani, to whom the Epipsychidion was 
 written, one of the interesting women of the world. 
 In herself she does not deserve this great interest. 
 She was intelligent, passionate, beautiful, unhappy, 
 capable of small literature ; but of this type of 
 women there are thousands in all classes of society 
 of whom the world has never heard. But when 
 Shelley idealised her, she became a personage, and 
 all who loved Shelley made her a wonder. 
 
 Medwin described her as one might describe a 
 Greek Muse. Mrs. Shelley wrote a long description 
 of her to Leigh Hunt, and painted her and her 
 character under the name of Clorinda, in her novel 
 of Lodore. Claire fell in love with her. Shelley, 
 enthralled by her solitary and sorrowful position, 
 thinking of her as the victim of oppression and 
 taken for a time with her beauty, mingled her up 
 with the ideal of Beauty he had created, partly from 
 Plato, partly from his own thought ; and yet, even 
 while he was with her, forgot the woman in the 
 vision which she enabled him to spin out of his own 
 
 1 An address to the Shelley Society. 
 176 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION 177 
 
 imagination. When he had expressed this vision in 
 the form of his poem, he left it behind him, and 
 with it he left Emilia. And when he ceased to 
 idealise her, his charm ceased to accompany her, and 
 the rest of his circle hesitated no longer to see her 
 in the rigid light of day. But this has not been the 
 case with those who care for poetry. As long as 
 Epipsychidion is read, Emilia Viviani will be a 
 romantic figure. She may have become prosaic to 
 Shelley, as she did ; Mary Shelley may have mocked 
 at her and at Shelley's Platonics, but she is still 
 alive in the world of the imagination of man, and so 
 much alive that we are even angry when the veil of 
 the commonplace is thrown over her. Indeed, her 
 tragic fate will always restore her to her poetic place. 
 She for whom the Ionian isle had been pictured as a 
 dwelling, and perfect love as her joy, died broken- 
 hearted, poisoned by the deadly breath of the 
 Maremma. And, as if she could not be kept out 
 of the poetic atmosphere, we cannot help thinking 
 of one, as fair, perhaps as unwise, who perished 
 in the Sienese Maremma, though it may be of the 
 dagger, not of the pestilence, and whom Dante has 
 made alive for ever : 
 
 Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia ; 
 Siena mi fe, disfecemi Maremma. 
 
 We keep her then, and we do so rightly, in the 
 element of Shelley's poem, but if ever we wish to 
 balance our poetic impression, and to clearly under- 
 stand that the woman and the poem belong not to 
 
 M 
 
178 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 the actual, but to the ideal world, we may take up 
 Shelley's letters. Every one knows what he said 
 afterwards of Epipsychidion and its subject. But 
 the words which follow were written before he wrote 
 the poem, and are cold and judicial. 
 
 ^I see Emilia sometimes, and whether her presence 
 is the source of pain or pleasure to me, I am equally 
 ill-fated in both. I am deeply interested in her 
 destiny, and the interest can in no manner influence 
 it. She is not, however, insensible to my sympathy, 
 and she counts it among her alleviations. As much 
 comfort as she receives from my attachment to her, 
 I lose. There is no reason that you should fear 
 any mixture of that which you call Love. My con- 
 ception of Emilia's talents augments every day. 
 Her moral nature is fine, but not above circum- 
 stances, yet I think her tender and true, which is 
 always something. How many are only one of 
 these things at a time.' 
 
 That is quite enough. It has not the touch of 
 any real passion. It was written, if Mr. Dowden's 
 date be not a conjecture, about a month before 
 he began Epipsychidion. During that month he 
 saw Emilia continually ; her affection for him in- 
 creased, and his for her ; and when he wrote the 
 poem, he had left behind for a time the indifferent 
 coldness of the words I have quoted. Much of 
 what he said was now mixed, consciously or un- 
 consciously, with some love for the woman herself, 
 for one who was the mortal image of the ideal 
 creature, the soul whom he loved as his true mate 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION 179 
 
 and complement In the world of pure thought 
 and love. In that ideal world some touch of 
 human love for Emilia now mingles itself with his 
 immortal love. It rises through the intellectual 
 imagery of the poem, and setting it on fire, re- 
 deems it from the coldness of a mere philosophy 
 of love, and makes it passionate. It was the 
 same, I think, in the Vita Nuova. Dante writes 
 of the absolute Love, and the Wisdom which is at 
 one with Love, and he represents this under the 
 form of Beatrice. But he also writes — borne away 
 by a real love — of Beatrice herself alone ; and then 
 again, seems to write of both together, as if the 
 earthly and the heavenly passion were wrought into 
 one. In Epipsychidion a similar thing takes place. 
 Shelley sometimes speaks of Emily as of a woman 
 towards whom he feels love, and sometimes only of 
 his Epipsychidion — the divine image of his soul, whom 
 he feels through her, and who is veiled in her. The 
 phrases change from being personal and passionate, 
 to being impersonal and passionate. The image and 
 the thing imaged are frequently fused into one. 
 Emilia and the ^ Soul out of his soul ' are clasped 
 together, like two hands, in the verse. But this is 
 chiefly in the beginning of the poem. As he warms 
 in his effort Emilia is neglected. She has done her 
 work. He has ascended, through her, to the divine 
 mistress of the world of his own thoughts — the spirit 
 whom he describes in the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty^ 
 whom he pursues in Alastor^ whom he had longed 
 for all his life long, but whom he had never grasped. 
 
i8o STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 E milia is but the passing shadow of this substance. 
 For a moment, in the rush of his song and his 
 thought, he seems to seize the substance at the end 
 of the poem. But the effort is too great. He falls 
 back from that high region with a broken wing. 
 ' Woe is me,' he cries — and he never tried to reach 
 it again. Epipsychidion is the last shape into which 
 his idealism of Love was thrown. The greatness of 
 the failure, following on the greatness of the effort, 
 made him put this kind of thing away for ever. 
 When he spoke afterwards of the poem, he said — 
 ^ It is a part of me which is already dead.' And all 
 the love poems which follow Epipsychidion are in the 
 real world, without a trace of philosophy, inspired 
 only by personal affection. 
 
 I have said that there was a personal element in 
 this poem, that Shelley had some feeling for Emilia 
 herself. But there was another element of person- 
 ality in it different from that which had to do 
 with her. He infused a personality into jjip id^al 
 Beauty to which he aspired to unite himself. Plato 
 did not inTpersShate his idea ot^Beauty, but Shelley 
 did this thing. He was forced by his nature to 
 realise the idea in some form, and to realise it as be- 
 longing especially to himself. Hence he created an 
 Epipsychidion — ' a_soul out of Ji Ls soul ' — a height- 
 ened, externalised personality of himself, conceived 
 as perfect ; an ideal image of his own being ; 
 different in sex ; his complement ; originally part of 
 him, now separated from him ; after whom he 
 pursued ; whom he felt in all that was calm and 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION i8i 
 
 sublime and lovely In knowledge, In nature, and In 
 woman ; and to absolute union with whom, such 
 union as Is described In the latter half of Epipsychi^ 
 dton^ he passionately aspired/ And this Being, since 
 she was the essence of all the loveliness which he 
 could conceive or feel, represented also to him and 
 for him — Ideal Beauty. This creation was not 
 Platonic — Plato spoke only of the Idea of Beauty. 
 This was an Invention of Shelley's, an addition, to 
 satisfy his cry for personality, to the Platonic theory 
 of love. He expresses It fully enough In his essay 
 
 1 He describes this love of his in 'the Zucca : 
 
 I loved — oh, no, I mean not one of ye, 
 
 Or any earthly one, though ye are dear 
 As human heart to human heart may be ; — 
 
 I loved, I know not what — but this low sphere, 
 And all that it contains, contains not thee, 
 
 Thou, whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere. 
 
 From Heaven and Earth, and all that in them are, 
 Veiled art thou, like a . . . star. 
 
 By Heaven and Earth, from all whose shapes thou flowest, 
 
 Neither to be contained, delayed, or hidden, 
 Making divine the loftiest and the lowest, 
 
 When for a moment thou art not forbidden 
 To live within the life which thou bestowest ; 
 And leaving noblest things vacant and chidden. 
 Cold as a corpse after the spirit's flight, 
 Blank as the sun after the birth of night. 
 
 In winds, and trees, and streams, and all things common. 
 
 In music, and the sweet unconscious tone 
 Of animals, and voices which are human, 
 
 Meant to express some feeling of their own ; 
 In the soft motions and rare smile of woman, 
 
 In flowers and leaves and in the grass fresh-shown, 
 Or dying in the autumn, I the most 
 Adore thee present or lament thee lost. 
 
i82 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 on Love ; and it reaches its extreme of mingled 
 ideality and personality in the poem of Epipsychidion. 
 The history of the development of this conception 
 is written in his poetry. In the Hymn to Intellectual 
 Beauty he conceives of the Archetypal Beauty , the 
 beauty which is the model and source of all beautiful 
 forms, much as Plato might have conceived of it. 
 It is not personal at all. It is a pervading spirit, 
 whose shadow , but never whose substance , is seen. 
 But this conception was soon changed. Re wanted 
 personality. He embodied this archetype in a 
 feminine being, existing in the super-phenomenal 
 world, glimpses of whom he saw at times, and she 
 was the other half of his own soul. ' Her voice,' 
 he says in Alastor^ 
 
 was like the voice of his own soul 
 Heard in the calm of Thought. 
 
 And if he could have been content with that — if 
 he could have kept himself wholly to the ideal 
 personality — it had been well. But he had not 
 strength enough. He was always driven, by a weak- 
 ness in his nature, to try and find her image in real 
 women. His ideal love continually glided back into 
 a desire of realising itself on earth ; and yet, when 
 he attempted to realise it in any woman, she fell, or 
 earthly love itself fell, so far below the ideal image, 
 that he was driven back again from the woman on 
 earth to the ideal in his own soul. Thus smitten to 
 and fro, he had no peace. He was, as he calls him- 
 self in AdonaiSy ' a power girt round with weakness ' 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION 183 
 
 — the creator of thoughts which afterwards pursued 
 their creator as wolves pursue a deer. 
 
 Alastor records the coming of this vision and the 
 agony of not being able to realise it. The poet, 
 unable to be content with the love of abstract Beauty 
 alone, unable to find it realised in any of its mortal 
 images on earth ; unable to live wholly in the super- 
 sensuous world, unable to satisfy himself in the 
 sensuous ; beaten and tortured between these two 
 inabilities, dies of the pain of the struggle. 
 
 Prince Athanase^ as we discover from the com- 
 mentary, would have recorded, perhaps step by step, 
 the vicissitudes of this pursuit. A number of other 
 poems contain allusions to this conception which, 
 from his long brooding on it, had become one of the 
 roots of Shelley's life and character. Epipsychidion 
 was its noblest, most triumphant, most complete 
 expression, and in that expression of it, it perished. 
 In the poem he recapitulates the whole history of 
 this idea in his soul. He describes, first, the being 
 whom his spirit, in his youth, oft 
 
 Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft 
 
 In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn, 
 
 whose voice came to him from nature, history, 
 romance, and high philosophy, whose spirit was the 
 harmony of truth. This is the Spirit in the Hymn 
 to Intellectual Beauty. Then he describes, in the 
 lines which begin — 
 
 Then from the caverns of my dreary youth, 
 the vain search for her, repeating in this passage 
 
1 84 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 the motive of the story of Alastor. In the midst of 
 this we come upon that phase of the pursuit which 
 is not contained in Alastor^ but is contained in the 
 notes to Prince Athanase—t)\Q meeting with that 
 false image of pure Beauty which awakens sensual 
 love, a phase which is treated of by Plato : 
 
 There — One, whose voice was venomed melody 
 Sate by a well, under blue nightshade bowers ; 
 The breath of her false mouth was like faint flowers, 
 Her touch was as electric poison, — flame 
 Out of her looks into my vitals came, 
 
 And this lower love may be compared with that 
 dwelt on in Shakespeare's later Sonnets, to which 
 Shelley, speaking of Epipsychidion^ refers. 
 
 Having thus recapitulated his youthful experience 
 in the pursuit of ideal Beauty, he next turns to 
 show how he sought in mortal women, and in love 
 of them, to find the shadow of this soul out of his 
 soul — some image of the celestial substance of pure 
 Beauty. He goes through these women, one after 
 another, and represents them under various symbols. 
 I have elsewhere made some conjectures with regard 
 to the actual women whom he represents under 
 these symbols, but no certainty can be arrived at 
 concerning them. Only one thing is plain, Mary 
 Godwin is the Moon of the passage, and it is clear 
 from what he says that she did not completely 
 satisfy his heart. But she only fails to satisfy him 
 so far as she is of the earth, and not of the ideal 
 region. He was quite content with her as long as 
 he chose to live in the outward world. But for the 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION 185 
 
 supersensuous universe, and as a realisation of his 
 spiritual bride, she was not enough. Then he meets 
 Emilia ; and in her, for a time, at his first contact 
 with her, he seems to meet the actual image, the 
 earthly form of the ideal Beauty whom he claims 
 as the bride of his soul. In speaking of her, he 
 mingles the ijdgal3nd,Jthe.---y eal togethe r, t he djvine__ 
 and_the Jmi nan. But as the poem goes on, the 
 woman as a woman ceases to be palpable in his 
 verse. There is no confusion now between the 
 image of Emily and the thing imaged. Emily as a 
 woman has disappeared. There is nothing left but 
 the vision of Beauty embodied in his Epipsychidion, 
 whom he seems at last to grasp, and whom he calls 
 Emily. Sometimes a phrase of personal passion 
 slips in, because of his ' error of seeking in a mortal 
 image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal,' but 
 from the moment he cries. 
 
 The day is come, and thou wilt fly with me, 
 
 he speaks only of the vision of his youth, of the 
 personality of her who is his second soul or perhaps 
 his very soul, of the substance of whom he only 
 possesses a shadow ; of the spiritual form of the 
 pure and ideal Beauty which, in the supersensuous 
 world, belongs to him ; of her whose pressure on 
 him from without is the source of all his ideals, all 
 his aspiration ; whom he feels speaking to him in 
 all knowledge, love, nature, and thought. Emilia 
 herself is but one step in the ladder by which he has 
 attained the vision of union with this pure, personal, 
 
1 86 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 spiritual shape of Beauty. It is with her, under 
 the name of Emily, that he flies away into the life 
 beyond phen omena. The description of the flight 
 is entirely symbolical. The Ionian isle and all else 
 are meant to be impalpable ; images of an immaterial 
 world. No keel, he declares, has ever ploughed 
 the sea-path to that island. It is cradled between 
 Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea. No scourges that 
 afflict the earth visit it. A soul burns in the heart 
 of it, an atom of the Eternal. And a passionate 
 description of his life there with Emily is not a 
 description of earthly passion. It is the description 
 of Shelley at last united to that other far-off^ half of 
 his being, and the incorporation of the two into one 
 is as incorporeal as the rest. It is a description of 
 the one ideal yearning of the soul towards Beauty ; 
 of the only true love which is felt in life (which but 
 touches earthly women on its path as means towards 
 its end) clasping at last its ideal in the immaterial 
 world of pure Thought, and with the emotion of 
 that Thought. But it is so far beyond that which 
 is possible for man to realise continuously while he 
 is shut in by mere phenomena, that having attained 
 it for a moment, he breaks down, and falls exhausted 
 from the height. 
 
 Woe is me ! 
 The winged words on which my soul would pierce _ 
 Into the heights of love's rare Universe, 
 Are chains of lead around its flight of fire. — 
 I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire ! 
 
 The one true love of human life is then ideal, not 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION 187 
 
 in the w orld of ,lIi^. ^nses at all, and cannot be 
 realised or s atisfied bj^ ^y thing or any one on earth. 
 Its object,(ideal Beau^Jcontains the substance of all 
 the varied forms ot Keauty which we find in thought, 
 in emotion, in nature, and in humanity. This 
 Beauty is the one life in a million forms which are 
 themselves its painted shadows. Hence, when we 
 love man, woman, or any form of nature, it is not 
 these that primarily we love. We love the living 
 spirit of Beauty, of which each of them is one phase 
 alone, and we love these, that we may pass beyond 
 them to the spirit that they partially express. They 
 are steps in a ladder by which we reach the perfect 
 reality. 
 
 Hence arose a theory of personal human love 
 which traverses the code of social morals, and that 
 theory Shelley held. It was, that to bind ourselves 
 down to one object of love alone was not wise, 
 because then we rendered ourselves incapable of 
 seeing and realising those different aspects of 
 the ideal Beauty which we could find in other 
 minds, in other personalities. When we limit our 
 loves, we limit our capacity, so far, of grasping a 
 full conception of Beauty. He introduces, logically 
 enough, this view of his into the midst oi Epipsychi- 
 dion. Whether Mary liked that theory, whether 
 it has any Tightness in it at all, how far Shelley 
 practised it, or refrained from putting it into prac- 
 tice, is not the question now. He held it in theory, 
 and he places it here. He never was attached, he 
 says, to that great sect — 
 
i88 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Whose doctrine is, that each one should select 
 Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, 
 And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend 
 To cold oblivion. 
 
 Feeling immediately that it will be said that to 
 love more than one person in this relation is to 
 destroy love, he expands his theory by stating that 
 love is of such a quality that it is not lost by being 
 divided. The first object of love is not less loved, 
 but more loved, by the person who loves, when he 
 gives love to other objects, to other persons. Love 
 is like understanding which grows bright by gazing 
 on many truths. Nay, if love is given to only one 
 object, it builds for itself a grave. Again, when we 
 divide the base things of life, suffering and dross, 
 we may diminish them until they are consumed. 
 But if we divide the nobler things, pleasure, and 
 love, and thought, each part exceeds the whole, and 
 we know not 
 
 How much, while any yet remains unshared. 
 Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared, 
 
 to man. 
 
 This is a theory capable of being wrongly 
 used by those who have the sensual idea of love 
 and beauty. By Shelley, who abhorred not only 
 sensuality, but even claimed the world beyond 
 the senses (the world of ideas) as the only real 
 world, it could not be used in that manner. But it 
 made him run counter to the code of morals which 
 prevails in society on the question of marriage. 
 The moment he ceased to love Harriet Westbrook 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION 189 
 
 he considered himself as no longer married to her, 
 and went away with a woman he did love. He never 
 ceased to love Mary, and therefore he was always 
 faithful to her. But he saw no reason whatever 
 why he should not, while he was faithful to Mary, 
 give deep affection to other women, and find 
 represented in them other phases of the absolute 
 Beauty, which phases he was bound to feel and 
 gain, through them. And this he did — though 
 society necessarily condemned his action — with a 
 conviction of his rightness. Emilia represented, 
 and with astonishing force to him, one of these 
 forms of the ideal Beauty, and enabled him, through 
 his affection for her, to get nearer to realisation of 
 it than he had ever done before. It is therefore 
 quite natural that the statement of this theory should 
 be, as it were, the centre piece of the poem. 
 
 I turn now to the poetical quality of the poem 
 and to the characteristics of Shelley's work displayed 
 in it. 
 
 It is an exceedingly personal poem, and contains 
 almost all Shelley's weaknesses and powers, and both 
 these at their height, because writing, and writing 
 passionately, about his own inward life, he was under 
 no such restraint as a subject apart from himself 
 would naturally furnish. Here nothing that he 
 thought seemed irrelevant, for the subject was his 
 own thought. 
 
 He starts on his way like the stream that leaped 
 when Moses smote the rock. The introduction 
 is short, but ends with a phrase which shows how 
 
190 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 he chose, from the very beginning, to throw off all 
 literary reticence : 
 
 I weep vain tears, blood would less bitter be, 
 Yet poured forth gladlier, could it profit thee. 
 
 And then we are afloat not on a river, but on a 
 torrent, on whose swift and flashing surface, as we 
 move, we have scarcely time to breathe. This marks 
 the whole poem. It is the most rapid of all his 
 works. There is only one pause in it : just before 
 the torrent changes into a deeper, quieter stream, 
 but a stream even more swift than the torrent. 
 The pause is where he stops to describe the theory 
 of love which he held. That is, as it were, the 
 portage in the midst of the descent of the river ; the 
 halt on the wayside before the race is taken up again, 
 with the goal in sight. 
 
 He begins by a description of Emily, but far 
 more a description of the image of Beauty he wor- 
 shipped in the calm of his soul. The phrases change, 
 as I said, from Emilia to the Beauty she shadows, 
 and from that Beauty back again to her. The two 
 are mingled as Form and IdeaN^re mingled. 
 
 It was a constant artistic habit of his, when he had 
 found a theme — and I use the word in its musical 
 sense — a theme such as he finds in the lines ; 
 
 Seraph of Heaven ! too gentle to be human, 
 Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman 
 All that is insupportable in thee 
 Of light and love and immortality ! 
 
 — to vary that theme as long as he could, changing 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION 191 
 
 the key, and then following eagerly the new thoughts, 
 with their correlative emotions, which were suggested 
 by the change of key. He follows these wherever 
 they lead him, no matter into what strange places ; 
 inspired, but with an ungirdled inspiration. He 
 did not retain, save rarely, that steady command 
 over his materials, that power of choice and rejec- 
 tion over his imaginations which the greatest artists 
 possess. In his eager movement of improvisation 
 he frequently puts down every thought — and the 
 thoughts are shaped in metaphors — -which occurs to 
 him ; and too often trusts to accumulation rather 
 than to choice to produce his effect. There are 
 fine exceptions, the best of which is the Ode to the 
 West Wind^ but they are exceptions. Again, he is 
 often forced, in order to get his thought into form 
 before him, to shape it into a multitude of meta- 
 phors, each without connection with its companions, 
 and at the end to find that he has failed to satisfy 
 himself. The thought is not shaped. The greater 
 poet, like Homer, would have chosen one com- 
 parison and done all he wanted with one. Three 
 times Shelley, working in this way, returns to the 
 charge at the beginning of this poem, and three 
 times he records his failure. 
 
 The series of metaphors which call the Seraph of 
 Heaven who is hidden in Emilia- 
 Sweet Benediction in the eternal Curse ! 
 Veiled Glory of this lampless Universe ! 
 Thou Moon beyond the clouds ! Thou living Form 
 Among the Dead ! Thou Star above the Storm ! 
 
192 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Thou Wonder and thou Beauty and thou Terror ! 
 Thou Harmony of Nature's art ! Thou Mirror 
 In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun, 
 All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on ! 
 
 — ten metaphors — end in his saying that his words 
 are dim and obscure her, as they certainly do. 
 
 The next attempt to embody his thought, in a 
 changed key, begins with 
 
 Sweet Lamp ! my moth-like Muse has burnt its wings ; 
 
 and ends, after thirteen metaphors, with another 
 confession of failure : 
 
 I measure 
 The world of fancies, seeking one like thee, 
 And find — alas ! mine own infirmity. 
 
 By this time, however, Shelley, who always 
 warmed while he wrote, his own music thrilling 
 him into quicker creation (one of the marks of him 
 as a fine artist being that at the end of his poems 
 he becomes a greater poet than at the beginning), 
 had risen into a higher region, and the beat of his 
 wing in it is stronger now and nobler than before. 
 Again he renews his attempt to shape his thought, 
 and he almost succeeds. 
 
 She met me. Stranger, upon life's rough way, 
 
 so he begins, and the series of similes with which he 
 indicates that glory of the Being of beauty which 
 shines through Emilia's mortal shape — here ended 
 by a rapid rush of metaphors, at last linked to- 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION 193 
 
 gether with some unity by his spiritual passion — 
 is a splendid series, containing two magnificent de- 
 scriptions of aspects of the sky, thrown off in the 
 quick rush of the verse for mere enrichment of his 
 thought. 
 
 The whole passage has the quality of great music, 
 and its fault, if I may call it a fault, is that it is done 
 in the manner of music, and the manner of music is 
 not the manner of poetry. Yet the higher he soars, 
 and the more noble his flight (and this is extremely 
 characteristic of Shelley as an artist), the more he 
 feels that he is not master of his own passion ; that 
 he cannot grasp the fiery bird of his own thought 
 and bid it stay its flight for definition. He cries 
 at the end : 
 
 Ah, woe is me ! 
 What have I dared ? where am I lifted ? how 
 Shall I descend, and perish not ? 
 
 And this, which I have described, applies not 
 only to this beginning, but to the whole poem. 
 Even after the extraordinary ease, rapidity, and 
 sustained loveliness of the last part, after its noble 
 and breathless climax, he feels that he has not 
 realised his conception, is most conscious of his 
 weakness when he is most master of his power. 
 ' Woe is me ' — he takes up the phrase again — 
 
 The winged words on which my soul would pierce 
 Into the height of love's rare Universe 
 Are chains of lead around its flight of fire. — 
 I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire ! 
 
 N 
 
194 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Yes, this is one of the marks of the man, and 
 well he knew it. 
 
 His head was bound with pansies overblown?- 
 
 It is easy to heap critical blame on Shelley for 
 this. Any fool is capable of that, and many have 
 had that capability. But if we could take away this 
 weakness we should not have Shelley any longer, 
 
 1 It maybe that I have dwelt a little too much on this confession of 
 weakness, and I certainly should not have done so if it had occurred 
 only in this poem, which is not only personal but philosophical. But 
 it appears again and again in poems which are wholly personal — at the 
 end of the Ode to the West Windy in the portrait he draws of himself in 
 the Adonais. Want of power to keep the heights he could gain was 
 felt by Shelley himself to be one of his characteristics. 
 
 Otherwise, I should have not made so much of it in this place j be- 
 cause this swooning, as it were, of the mind when it is brought face to 
 face with absolute Beauty, and is therefore thrilled with the absolute 
 Love, is common to all the mediaeval poets who wrote about Love, 
 and is described by them literally and allegorically. Even in the 
 Con^ito, which Shelley may have had in his memory, and where Dante, 
 in his later years, wrote distinctly of his Lady as signifying Philosophy 
 — the most beautiful and excellent daughter of the Ruler of the 
 Universe — we find the Poet making the same confession as Shelley 
 made. He describes at the end of the third chapter of the third 
 Treatise how powerless language is to express what the intellect 
 (Jntellettoi) sees. 
 
 * E dico che li miei pensieri, che sono parlar d'amore, sono di lei j 
 che la mia anima, cioe '1 mio affetto, arde di potere cio con la lingua 
 narrare. E perche dire nol posso, dico che Tanima se ne lamenta 
 dicendo : ^Lassa, ch" to non son possente.'' E questa e V altra inefFabilita j 
 cioe, che la lingua non e di quello che lo 'ntelletto vede compiutamente 
 seguace.' 
 
 This only corresponds with that failure of words, of which Shelley 
 speaks, to express thought. But Dante's mind was too mighty to lose 
 its power over itself. It is only at the sight of the eternal light of 
 Deity — only after he has drawn nearer to expression of the ineffable 
 than we can conceive possible to man, that he cries 
 * Air alta fantasia qui manco possa ! * 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION 195 
 
 but some one else, and one distinction he has among 
 the poets would be lost. For to take away the 
 weakness would be to take away also the powers of 
 which the weakness was an extreme. He fell ex- 
 hausted, but it was because he soared so high ; he 
 trembled like a leaf, but it was because he was of 
 such a nature that he could feel the more delicate 
 secrets of the Universe. 
 
 And the question to ask is not — ' Why was he 
 so weak ? ' but — ^ Is there any other poet who could 
 soar in this skylark fashion, and into these fine 
 ethereal regions ? ' and ^ Is it possible to soar into 
 them in any other way ? ' There are tenderer 
 regionSc no doubt, than these, wiser also, and more 
 practical regions — more practical for comfort and 
 teaching to men, for sweet and helpful thought, for 
 feeling that inspires and heals — higher regions where 
 the more majestic imaginations dwell, like the gods, 
 in valleys of calm and joy ; and into these Shelley 
 did not soar. But his nature did not take him 
 there. Where his nature did take him was a region 
 into which no one else takes us, and where it is well 
 we should sometimes travel ; or, if it be said it is 
 not well, where a good number of us wish to be 
 taken. There is no one else but Shelley to bring 
 us into that far dim country. This is a part of his 
 distinctiveness and his distinction ; and it is a great 
 thing for us. And the solemn persons who do not 
 wish to come, but stay only among the other regions 
 of poetry, need not grudge us our charioteer, nor 
 our course in the ether with him. 
 
196 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Next, I wish to draw attention to another poetic 
 power Shelley possessed, which is well illustrated in 
 Epipsychidion. It is his power of realising and 
 describing landscapes which are wholly ij^g^ They 
 do not belong to nature, nor do they imitate 
 her. They are no more records of what has been 
 actually seen with the eyes than are the landscapes 
 of Burne-Jones. Like him, Shelley invented his 
 landscape for his su bject, and it is intended to be 
 remote from ^ality^ 
 
 When, descnBmg how the voice of the spirit of 
 Beauty came to him in solitudes, he speaks of the 
 fountains and the odours of flowers, the breeze and 
 the rain, he does what another man could do. But 
 when he creates the country of the following lines, 
 which is dreamland, and yet which we see and feel, 
 he does what no other poet but Shelley has ever 
 done. He meets the spirit of Beauty 
 
 In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn, 
 Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn, 
 Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves 
 Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves 
 Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor 
 Paved her light steps ; — on an imagined shore, 
 Under the grey beak of some promontory 
 She met me, robed in such exceeding glory 
 That I beheld her not. 
 
 How unlike nature — yet how clear ! How 
 ethereal, yet how vivid in his imagination ! It is 
 indefinite, yet definite enough to see. And where 
 it is most definite — ' under the grey beak of some 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION 197 
 
 promontory ' — it is made most ideal by the super- 
 natural touch at the end, which transfers the whole 
 to the region of the finest-woven thought, — ' robed 
 in such exceeding glory that I beheld her not ' — a 
 phrase which throws its ideality back on all that has 
 preceded it, and makes the landscape even more 
 ethereal. 
 
 Still more out of the world does his description 
 become when he pictures himself as leaving this 
 imagined land, and springing, ^ sandalled with 
 plumes of fire,' into pure space to find his ideal. 
 Yet, though he is in an unseen, unimagined void, 
 the vision that he sees is definite. He beholds 
 himself flitting here and there, and then — 
 
 She, whom prayers or tears then could not tame, 
 Past, like a God throned on a winged planet, 
 Whose burning plumes to tenfold swiftness fan it, 
 Into the dreary cone of our life's shade. 
 
 What impersonation ! Clearness of vision midst of 
 the visionary ! 
 
 And now a new imagery comes into the poem. 
 The whole landscape changes to fit a new mood of 
 mind. Unity of impression is neglected for the 
 sake of incessant altering of the mood, and with 
 each mood the scenery alters. He has seen a 
 momentary vision of the perfect Beauty, but has 
 been unable to pursue it. The whole universe 
 mocks his endeavour, and he goes into the wintry 
 forest which represents life after youth's ideal has 
 been dethroned. Another poet would not have 
 
198 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 carried further the metaphor of the forest. Shelley, 
 on the contrary, invents a whole scenery for the 
 wood; realises it, as if it were an actual forest. It is 
 a thorny place, through which he stumbles, and great 
 trees fill it and grow on the grey earth. Strange 
 plants and strange beasts are in it, and untaught 
 foresters. It is there he meets by a well, under 
 nightshade bowers, the image of sensual love. 
 When he is deceived by his first hope, and stays his 
 footsteps, he seems changed into a deer hunted by 
 his own thoughts.^ On the path, then, one stands 
 like the Moon descended to Endymion, and leads 
 him into a deep cave in the wild place, where he 
 falls asleep; and Death and Life flit through the 
 cave, like wingless boys, crying ' Away, he is not of 
 our crew ' ; that is, not of the life nor of the death 
 which rule the actual world. At last he is awaked 
 from sleep — from a sleep which is a sleep in a dream, 
 and which, in the dream, has its own dreams — by 
 Emily coming through the wood which springs into 
 life before her, passing from naked winter to soft 
 summer. 
 
 The imagery then changes again, and he paints 
 himself as a great earth, a world of love, with fruits 
 and flowers, billows, mists, and storms and skies, 
 
 1 He repeats the thought in the Adonais : 
 
 And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, 
 Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey. 
 
 And the thought is taken from Wordsworth — 
 
 And his own mind did like a tempest strong 
 
 Come to him thus, and drove the weary wight along. 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION 199 
 
 ruled by twin spheres of light, by moon and sun, by 
 Mary and by Emily — each embodying for him 
 phases and powers of the Absolute Beauty. Let 
 others also come, he cries, and add their powers, 
 and be other shapes of Beauty whom also I may 
 love. 
 
 We read all this vaguely, and with vague pleasure. 
 It is too changing, too indefinite in thought to give 
 a high intellectual pleasure, and it is too far removed 
 into a world of fancy to awaken personal passion, or 
 to interest us by its emotion. But the curious thing 
 is that if we try to see the landscape or the images 
 that move through it, both landscape and images, 
 though they are only symbolic, are really definite. 
 The places can be seen, described, could be painted. 
 Shelley has looked upon them, and put down clearly 
 what he saw. This is creation, and a kind of it 
 which we do not meet in the work of other poets. 
 We may call it useless, but it gives us pleasure. 
 We also see it as Shelley saw it. But if there had 
 been more passion in it, if the thought desired to 
 be expressed had been more intense in Shelley's 
 mind, the creation would have been still clearer, 
 would not have been so mixed with foreign matter. 
 The symbols used would not then change so often, 
 the vision would be more at unity with itself. Our 
 pleasure would not be so mingled, nor should we 
 be forced to give so much study to disentangle a 
 web of emotion and thought and memory, which, 
 when we have disentangled it, does not quite seem 
 as if it were worth the trouble which we take. 
 
200 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 But now matters change. The imagination in 
 Shelley has been warmed by the work it has done, 
 even though that work is not of the best. He has 
 also got rid of confusion, of side issues, of memories 
 he thought right to introduce, of things he thought 
 it best to conciliate. One thought alone remains 
 now. It has emerged clear from all the rest and is 
 their mistress. The moment Shelley grasps it and 
 isolates it vividly, his imagination rushes into it 
 alone ; all his emotion collects around it, and the 
 rest of the poem is as luminous as the previous part 
 is obscure. It is with Shelley as with all artists who 
 are worthy of the name — as emotion deepens clear- 
 ness deepens. 
 
 The day is come and thou wilt fly with me 
 
 begins the close. Mary, Emily, all the rest, have 
 passed away ; and Shelley is alone, in perfect peace, 
 with the living image of his own soul, with his being 
 of absolute Beauty. A splendid passage about love, 
 closely knit, the metaphors hand in hand, introduces 
 the new theme of his flight to the island with her 
 who is the soul out of his soul. And then we possess 
 the creation of the island of imagination, of himself 
 as Love, of Emily as absolute Beauty, of their life 
 with one another in absolute joy, of their imperish- 
 able union in passion. This is the vision to which 
 all the rest has led. It is clear, simple, astonishingly 
 bright in the sunlight of thought, in the sunlight of 
 feeling. It is realised to the smallest detail. The 
 landscape is luminous, set in pelluc id air, and is 
 
EPIPSYCHIDION 201 
 
 wholly at unity with itself. Every touch increases 
 the impression, and I think it is, in its own super- 
 sensual world, the most beautiful thing — for pure 
 beauty — which exists in that type of English 
 poetry. It is not sublime, it is not on the highest 
 range of poetry, it is not of that primal emotion 
 which redeems the heart from the world, but it is of 
 an exquisite and solitary loveliness. And it runs 
 without a break in its beauty to a noble end, to a 
 perfect climax — to that fine and spiritual reality of 
 passion, which is, when it is pure of self, the last 
 summit of human joy and peace to which we attain 
 in life. 
 
KEATS 
 
 John Keats, though of the same date as Shelley, 
 is not of the same time in the world of poetry, and 
 the resting-places of the two poets are no unfitting 
 symbol of that truth. The grave of Shelley lies 
 close set in a hollow of the ancient city-wall, in the 
 Protestant graveyard at Rome. Around it the 
 trees have grown up for many years, and the paths 
 that divide the terraces have been established of old. 
 But Keats lies under his own field flowers, about a 
 bowshot from the grave of Shelley, where no ruins 
 touch his stone as the Aurelian wall touches the 
 ashes of Shelley. There are no ancient cypresses 
 near, no well-worn paths, no sense of old-world 
 quietude such as hallows with tenderness a place 
 where the dead have lain for many years. The 
 wild soft grass is there, but the grass is always 
 young, and does not tell, like the cypresses that 
 shadow Shelley, of growth and of decay, of ex- 
 perience and pain. It fitly enwraps the grave of a 
 poet who has in his poetry no special note of any 
 age, or if of any, of ours more than of his own. 
 Endymion^ Hyperion^ the Ode to a Grecian Urtty 
 Isabella^ have no political, religious, social elements 
 
 202 
 
KEATS 20;^' 
 
 such as In Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, or Cole- 
 ridge tell us at once when the poems were written. 
 Shelley lived and wrote with Keats, but there is a 
 distance between them as there is between their 
 graves, as great difference between the spirit of 
 their poetry as there is between the natural scenery 
 that encompasses their resting-places. 
 
 Moreover, all the poets of Keats's own time were 
 influenced by the political and social aims which 
 were forced into actuality in the French Revolu- 
 tion. The ideas that awoke the youthful passion of 
 Wordsworth, of Coleridge, that stirred the wrath 
 of Scott, that worked like yeast in Byron and 
 brought forth new matter, that Shelley reclothed 
 and made into a prophecy of the future — the ex- 
 citement, the turmoil, the life and death struggle 
 which gathered round the Revolution — were ignored 
 and unrepresented by Keats. Their poetry spoke 
 of man ; of his destiny, and his wrongs, his rights, 
 duties and hopes ; it is poetry not only for the 
 sake of the art, but also poetry for the sake of the 
 human race. It has an end beyond the pure artist 
 end, and that end had its ground in the primary 
 ideas of the Revolution. 
 
 In Shelley that was for the first time partly modi- 
 fied. Half his poetry is divided from this excite- 
 ment around the cause and interests of mankind, and 
 written for himself alone. It is art in love with art. 
 And the strange thing is true that in this man, in 
 whom the spirit of the Revolution flamed highest, 
 began the death in poetry of that fiery impulse. 
 
204 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 There is an impassable gulf between the Prometheus 
 Unbound and Epipsychidion^ and the air of the one 
 is unbreathable by the other. 
 
 But in Keats the ideas of the Revolution have dis- 
 appeared. He has, in spite of a few passages and 
 till quite the end of his career, no vital interest in the 
 present, none in jnan as a whole, none in the political 
 movement of human thought, none in the future 
 of mankind, none in liberty, equality, or fraternity, 
 no interest in anything but beauty. And of all 
 the religious and theological questions, of the lives 
 of the poor, of education and class divisions, of the 
 nature of the soul and whence it derived truth, 
 of its relation to the natural world, of duty to our 
 fellow-men, of whether materialism or idealism were 
 true, of God in his relation to man, of God in 
 nature — questions which one and all were vital to 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley, and 
 afterwards to Tennyson, Browning, arid Arnold, 
 which, though not discussed as doctrines, yet water 
 like rivers all the landscape of their work — there is, 
 in spite of a few vague aspirations, not one solitary 
 trace in Keats. It is not that they are consciously 
 laid aside, it is as if they had never existed in the 
 world. The human passion of the Prometheus Un^ 
 bound was in his ears. It fell upon them as unheard 
 as the war trumpets of earth are by the angels in 
 heaven. 
 
 Once, in his first volume, he hopes in poetry to 
 * find the agonies, the strife of human hearts,' but the 
 hope has no result in his work. Then, later on, it 
 
KEATS 205 
 
 seems to occur to him that he is living in a world of 
 fevered thought and pain. It was so when he wrote 
 upon the Nightingale, for a vague heartache then 
 beset him, and he realised that the world was 
 troubled. But then his impulse was to fly from it 
 all— to drink of Hippocrene, and leave the world 
 unseen, and with the nightingale fade away into the 
 forest dim. 
 
 lie ade far away, dissolve, and quite forget 
 
 What thou among the leaves hast never known, 
 The weariness, the fever, and the fret 
 
 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan ; 
 Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 
 
 Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies ; 
 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 
 And leaden-eyed despairs. 
 Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes. 
 Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 
 
 That was his temper, and this is the strange new 
 position of Keats, as a poet, in relation to the 
 impulse of the Revolution. That impulse is dead 
 in Keats. 
 
 The reason of this remarkable change, this isola- 
 tion of Keats, even from his close contemporaries 
 Byron and Shelley, was that he unconsciously felt, 
 as they did not, that the ideas on which the world 
 had lived since 1789 were, in that form, exhausted. 
 No high spiritual or political emotion of any kind 
 came to him out of the heart of the people, for 
 there was no such emotion in England. After 
 Waterloo, when he began to write, the country had 
 sunk into a mean or a sullen materialism. When 
 
2o6 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 the wave of the Revolution ebbed, the ship of 
 Imagination was stranded on the shore of apathy. 
 The middle class In England was excited enough 
 about getting on, about wealth and comfort ; the 
 poor were excited by starvation and oppression, but 
 the old days when all Europe was young in thought, 
 when men lived by Ideal hopes, when even the poor 
 dreamed dreams, when faith was Infinite, when 
 Wordsworth saw the new-born world bathed In 
 dawn — were dead and gone. And Keats turned 
 from it all with scorn and took refuge in the 
 Ideas and the beauty of the past. It Is true that 
 Scott did likewise, while he was a poet ; but he did 
 it for a dijfFerent reason and in another temper. 
 Shelley wrote alongside of Keats, but he was out of 
 England, and did not realise the degradation of his 
 country creeping, like a murderous sleep, into his 
 soul. He felt It, but he felt It as an excitement, 
 because it awakened hatred of It In his heart. He 
 had the power to abhor It and voice his abhorrence, 
 because he saw it from a distance. Unlike Keats, 
 he could still write about the Interests of humanity, 
 but they were not Its present, but Its future Interests. 
 When he touched on the present he touched It with 
 wrath as of fire. He did what he could to destroy 
 it, and he painted its overthrow and the rebirth of 
 man, through its doom, into a new life. But had 
 he lived In England he might have, like Keats, 
 Ignored the whole of the society in which he lived, 
 and set aside all the past. This Is what Keats 
 did. Unable to endure the lifelessness, the ugll- 
 
KEATS 207 
 
 ness, the meanness of his time, he turned his back 
 on it and sought the glory that he needed in the 
 storied days of old Romance, in the far-off loveli- 
 ness of Greece. Here is the sonnet with which he 
 prefaces his first volume of poems. We hear how he 
 strikes, in the very first line, the note of his sorrow. 
 
 Glory and loveliness have passed away ; 
 
 For if we wander out in early morn, 
 
 No wreathed incense do we see upborne 
 Into the East, to meet the smiling day ; 
 No crowd of nymphs soft-voic'd and young and gay, 
 
 In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, 
 
 Roses, and pinks, and violets, to adorn 
 The shrine of Flora in her early May. 
 But there are left delights as high as these, 
 
 And I shall ever bless my destiny. 
 That in a time, when under pleasant trees 
 
 Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, 
 A leafy luxury, seeing I could please 
 
 With these poor offerings a man like thee. 
 
 The poems that followed are steeped in his own 
 delight in nature, in the visions of Greek life, in 
 mediaeval tales. The past is all in all, the present 
 England has vanished away. The year after this 
 volume he published Endymion — ' the stretched 
 metre of an antique song.' The induction to the 
 poem proclaims again his revolt from the world of 
 commonplace in which he lives, and he resolves to find 
 beauty far away since it cannot be found near at hand. 
 
 Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth 
 Of noble natures, of the gloomy days. 
 Of all the unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways 
 Made for our searching : 
 
2o8 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 there is one thing, he concludes, which remains, 
 ^ A thing of beauty is a joy for ever ; Its loveliness 
 increases.' There is my hope, mine, and the hope 
 of all who live in these inhuman days. Where shall 
 he seek and find it ? and he answers, ^ in the love- 
 liness of pure Nature ; in the great tragic stories 
 of the world, acted when the world was great ; in 
 all the fair and chivalrous tales of love and fate and 
 beauty ' ; 
 
 yes, in spite of all, 
 y Some shape of beauty moves away the pall 
 
 From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, 
 Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon 
 For simple sheep ; and such are daffodils 
 With the green world they live in ; and clear rills 
 That for themselves a cooling covert make 
 'Gainst the hot season ; the mid-forest brake, 
 Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms : 
 And such, too, is the grandeur of the dooms 
 We have imagined for the mighty dead ; 
 AlMovely tales that we have heard or read : 
 An endless fountain of immortal drink, 
 Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink. 
 
 This, then, was his fir§t pursuit — the soul of all his 
 poetry. * With a great poet,' he says, ' the sense of 
 beauty overcomes every other consideration.' 
 
 Indeed, the poet does not think as he writes of any 
 other thing than the joy he is receiving from the tide 
 of beauty which, flowing through his senses, awakens 
 in his heart emotions so creative that they become 
 ideas ; and these ideas, mingling musically together, 
 become one ideal ; and this, his energy, now glowing 
 all through with feeling, embodies at once in form. 
 
KEATS :? 1, 209 
 
 Then, immediately, the poem is incarnate. Nor does 
 he propose any end to himself except the embodiment 
 of his pleasure. It is only afterwards, when the poem 
 is made, that he desires that his pleasure should be 
 vital for others, and hopes to find his own pleasure 
 sent back to him by the sympathy of his fellow-men. 
 But that is an afterthought. At the moment of 
 delightful creation he has lost himself, the world, 
 fame, the desire for sympathy, in the ravishment of 
 beauty and its emotion. And Keats is accurately 
 true to himself when he says : * I feel assured I 
 should write from the mere yearning and fondness 
 for the beautiful, even if my night's labours should 
 be burned every morning.' Nor was it Beauty in 
 this or that particular form that he worshipped. 
 He loved it in the flower and in the cloud, but he 
 loved it in each thing as a part only of the Universal 
 Beauty, which itself, one and infinite, abode in all 
 things — * the mighty abstract idea of Beauty,' as he 
 calls it. With this his heart was filled, his loneli- 
 ness peopled. No wonder he escaped from the 
 meanness of the world, for this is how he described 
 his life : ' I feel more and more every day as my 
 imagination strengthens that I do not live in this 
 world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner 
 am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are 
 stationed round me, and serve my spirit the office 
 of a King's body-guard. Then tragedy with 
 sceptered pall comes sweeping by, and according to 
 my state of mind, I am with Achilles shouting in the 
 trenches or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily/ 
 
2IO STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 But there was another trouble from which he 
 freed himself. It was the trouble which the condi- 
 tion of things in the world gave the poets them- 
 selves. The condition was always there, though its 
 badness was intensified in the days of Keats. It had 
 many forms. Wordsworth called it the heavy and 
 the weary weight of this unintelligible world. In 
 musing on the sorrowful problems of life Coleridge 
 lost his early joy. Man as the sport of fate or the 
 victim of God became the object of the bitter con- 
 tempt of Byron. Shelley was tormented day and 
 night because of evil. That was part of the woe, 
 and Keats threw it all overboard at the beginning 
 of his poetic life. All I need to know, he said, is 
 Beauty. It is not all we need to know ; but when 
 we are utterly wearied, despondent and embittered, 
 it is a good thing to lead us into the sorrowless 
 land of beauty, and Keats, even now, brings to 
 us that blessed healing and refreshment. 
 
 It is true that in the earlier poems there are 
 many passages which tell us that the fate of 
 humanity, and mortal sorrows and joys, touched the 
 mind of Keats. He felt that he ought, as he grew 
 into fuller prophecy, to take them as his subject and 
 be passionately involved in them. But this was in 
 the future. At present his life was elsewhere, in 
 the pursuit of loveliness. Even when, as in Endy- 
 mion, he glances at the sad fates of men, it is but a 
 glance, and he passes on his way to range the woods 
 with Cynthia. 
 
 Two other elements in the condition of their world 
 
KEATS 211 
 
 irritated the poets. One was that modern science 
 had deprived nature of beauty by depriving it of life. 
 The other was that worldliness of heart had robbed 
 men of the child's unconscious love of the loveliness 
 of the universe. And the poets, like Keats, had fled 
 to Greece to find the divine element of life and of 
 childhood in the world. Goethe cried out in the 
 midst of German dulness for the classic world. 
 But he was himself too fresh not to be above too 
 great a regret for it. The regret in him was tran- 
 sient, and only gave him a strong emotion which he 
 turned into an additional power of enjoying the 
 present, as every morning created it afresh for his 
 enchantment. But Schiller was not like him. In 
 his youth regret for the vanished beauty of the 
 Greek world, where all was life, was pre-eminent. 
 ' Where art thou, lovely world,' he cries in the Gods 
 of Greece. ^ Return again, 
 
 Schone Welt, wo bist du? Kehre wieder, 
 Holdes Bliithenalter der Natur ! 
 Ach, nur in dem Feenland der Lieder 
 Lebt noch deine fabelhafte Spur. 
 Ausgestorben trauert das Gefilde, 
 Keine Gottheit zeigt sich meinem Blick. 
 Ach, von jenem lebenwarmen Bilde 
 Blieb der Schatten nur zuriick. 
 
 Wordsworth, even Wordsworth, breaks out once, 
 impassioned with distress, because nothing we see in 
 nature is ours, because we are out of tune with her 
 beauty, into his Pagan cry : 
 
212 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 O God, I M rather be 
 A pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 
 
 There were moments in which the poets of that time 
 longed for the vital universe of the Greek. Keats 
 took all these moments, and made them into that 
 which they regretted. The other poets mourned a 
 death in nature ; but Keats thought, There is no 
 need to mourn ; Nature is not dead but alive. The 
 living world is at our doors. What the Greek felt 
 we may feel. And so vigorous was his ardour that 
 when he drew close to this life he was drawn 
 into it and clasped its joy and beauty. He 
 did not reproduce it. Endymion is not Greek, nor 
 Lamia^ nor Hyperion. But he won its temper, the 
 temper of the divine childhood of the world. He 
 forgot the weary and the heavy weight of the unin- 
 telligible, and dwelling in the absolute beauty lived 
 and breathed in joy. 
 
 We may trace this daily companionship with 
 beauty through his poetry of nature. We must not 
 say that Keats's work on natural scenery was at all 
 like the work of the Greeks upon it. It differs, 
 from the outside, in almost every way. But the 
 temper of the soul with which he looked on nature 
 had all the simplicity, and the same feelings of joy 
 and worship wrought together, which a young Athen- 
 ian might have had before Socrates came among 
 
KEATS 213 
 
 the youths to disturb their life by urging them to 
 the pursuit of knowledge of themselves. Such a 
 youth moved in a living world, and everything that 
 lived in it was lovely and might speak to him. It 
 was no mere ball of fire which then the young man 
 saw when he looked on the rising of the sun from 
 the Acropolis, but Apollo himself, burning in his 
 car with ardour, and driving the tameless steeds. 
 It was no dead volcanic world he saw when the 
 moon sailed through the sky, but the goddess of the 
 silver bow on her way to kiss Endymion. At any 
 moment, as he walked among the olives and the oaks, 
 he might meet Pan with his ' sweet pipings ' and 
 all the choir of fauns. From every tree under whose 
 shade he slept at noon, from every brook where he 
 drank at eve, the dryad or the naiad might come 
 forth, and the immortal knit relation to the mortal. 
 
 And this very temper, half worship, half joy, and 
 both in a thrill of hourly expectation of the birth of 
 the wonderful ; this living sensibility, this power of 
 seeing all things with a child's amazement and for- 
 getfulness, was the temper of Keats when he was 
 with nature. It is not so much the temper of any 
 other of the poets. 
 
 If sometimes, when he has mingled thought with 
 nature, he is a little out of his unconscious world 
 with her, even then he will not have anything to do 
 with the persons who philosophise about her, who 
 ask questions about her life. Then he is like, 
 not Socrates, but the transient mood in which 
 Socrates was when Phaedrus brought him to that 
 
214 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 pleasant place by the Ilissus. Some one has talked 
 to Socrates, as the sun-theory persons might talk to 
 one of us, of the rationalising explanation of the 
 legends of nature. 
 
 ' My dear Phaedrus,' Socrates answers, ' I quite 
 acknowledge that these explanations are very nice, 
 but he is not to be envied who gives them. And if 
 he is sceptical about the marvels of nature, and 
 would fain reduce them all to the laws of probability, 
 this sort of crude philosophy will take up all his 
 time. I must first know myself, therefore I say 
 farewell to all this. The common opinion is enough 
 for me.' 
 
 And though Socrates does not care for the trees 
 and the country, and would rather be in towns where 
 men, his teachers, live, yet when he is brought to 
 the reposeful spot near the Ilissus, his enjoyment of 
 it, and his readiness to accept the popular feeling 
 about the nymphs, would have delighted Keats. 
 Moreover, the first sentences both of Socrates and 
 Phaedrus are like a piece out of one of the poems of 
 Keats. 
 
 * The little stream,' says Phaedrus, * is delightfully 
 clear and bright ; I can fancy that there might be 
 maidens playing near.' 'Yes, indeed,' answers So- 
 crates, ' and a fair and shady resting-place, full of 
 summer sounds and scents. There is the lofty and 
 spreading plane tree, and the agnus castus, high and 
 clustering, in the fullest blossom, and the greatest 
 fragrance ; and the stream which flows beneath the 
 plane tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging 
 
KEATS 215 
 
 from the ornaments and images this must be a spot 
 sacred to Achelous and the nymphs. Moreover, 
 there is a sweet breeze, and the grasshoppers chir- 
 rup, and the greatest charm of all is the grass, like 
 a pillow gently sloping to the head. My dear Phae- 
 drus, you have been an admirable guide.' 
 
 Keats might have said it all ; it is the note of 
 his younger poetry about nature. The description 
 breathes enjoyment from every word, not intense 
 enjoyment, but the frank, child-like pleasure of that 
 everyday life which saw beauty immediately, never 
 missed it, was its common companion and lover ; 
 and therefore, since beauty was never strange, did 
 not lose, through intoxication with it, the use of 
 intelligence or the powers of the soul. 
 
 It was a temper, in Keats, of unruffled pleasure, 
 a sensitive, girl-like, sensuous pleasure in beauty, 
 and in the consolation of beauty to the soul ; a 
 pleasure which loved also to have the body comfort- 
 able while the soul enjoyed, so that all things might 
 be in harmony. When Socrates speaks of the grass 
 softly sloping like a pillow for his head, of the 
 delicious coolness of the stream to the feet — we 
 not only listen to a Greek, we listen to Keats. It 
 was also a temper in him which, freed from the 
 religious and philosophical troubles of men, could 
 play with nature. He had a way of fluttering, 
 ^ butterfly-fashion, from one object to another, touch- 
 ing for the moment the momentary charm of each 
 thing — the work of fancy who * is never at home.' 
 There is a passage in one of his earliest poems where 
 
2i6 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 he lingers on the bridge above the stream, and with 
 the quick glancing eyes of a faun that waits for a 
 nymph in lazy pleasure, notices minutely all things, 
 or rather, lets all things flit in and out of his brain ; 
 not caring to ask any to stay and keep him com- 
 pany, but pleased with them and this game of life 
 — enjoyment without thought, or thought its own 
 enjoyment. 
 
 Ever let the Fancy roam, 
 
 Pleasure never is at home : 
 
 At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth, 
 
 Like to bubbles when rain pelteth ; 
 
 Then let winged Fancy wander 
 
 Through the thought still spread beyond her : 
 
 Open wide the mind's cage door, 
 
 She '11 dart forth, and cloudward soar. 
 
 O sweet Fancy ! let her loose. 
 
 That is often his temper. It is not the temper 
 of the deeper imagination. That is grave and 
 penetrative, and, when the game of fancy ceased to 
 please him, its power was active in Keats, through 
 all his intercourse with nature. It uses the work of 
 fancy to decorate the ineffable landscape it creates — 
 the landscape the soul sees underneath that which 
 the eye beholds — but itself goes home to humanity 
 in the midst of nature, and to nature in the midst 
 of humanity. Here is a verse in the Ode to Psyche 
 in which the imagination, sounding its incom- 
 municable depths, moves like a creative spirit ; in 
 which the mind of man and the soul of the natural 
 world are woven together ; and at the last, to warm 
 
KEATS 217 
 
 and soften all, human passion arises to vitalise the 
 whole. 
 
 Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane 
 
 In some untrodden region of my mind, 
 Where branched thoughts, new-grown with pleasant pain, 
 
 Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind : 
 Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees 
 
 Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep ; 
 And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees. 
 
 The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep ; 
 And in the midst of this wide quietness 
 A rosy sanctuary will I dress 
 With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, 
 
 With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, 
 With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign. 
 
 Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same : 
 And there shall be for thee all soft delight 
 
 That shadowy thought can win, 
 A bright torch, and a casement ope at night 
 
 To let the warm Love in ! 
 
 When he had finished with En^mion, when the 
 trouble of the world had come upon him, when he 
 had seen his brother die, and felt himself that life was 
 Ill-made for him, his note towards nature changes. 
 It is mixed with sorrow, but it is sorrow which is 
 impassioned to lose itself in joy, which remembers 
 the times of self-forgetfulness, and urges him to 
 escape. * Leave me behind,' cries sorrow, ^ escape 
 for your life into joy.' And Keats obeys ; flies to 
 nature and her loveliness, and for a time succeeds 
 In forgetting; then the note of pain falls in again, 
 and again he forgets it, and again remembers, and 
 
2i8 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 again forgets — till the alternating passion is worn 
 out and all the mixed music dies. 
 
 This is the spirit which informs the Ode to a 
 Nightingale. That ode is far more beautiful, be- 
 cause more human, than the earlier poems of nature. 
 The beginning is full of sensibility to human pain. 
 He would quite forget what the nightingale had 
 never known among the leaves — 
 
 The weariness, the fever, and the fret 
 
 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan ; 
 
 — forget it on the ' viewless wings of poesy,' in the 
 tender night, in the green depths of the woods, 
 among 
 
 The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild ; 
 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine ; 
 Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves. 
 
 But his desire to escape from this, on which I have 
 already dwelt, is not now strong enough to conquer 
 the siege of the world's sorrow. The trouble , 
 returns, the song of the bird makes him half in love 
 with easeful death. Had he been as gay as of old, 
 he would not have thought it, as he does now, 
 ' rich to die,' 
 
 To cease upon the midnight with no pain. 
 
 But he was changed ; the new sensibility to love and 
 pain deepens the colour, strengthens the thought 
 and passion, of his nature poetry. It has entered 
 into the flitting delight in beauty, and makes the 
 description of nature more close, more sensitive, 
 
UNIVERSITY I 
 
 KEATS 219 
 
 more imaginatively heard and seen than anything he 
 has written in the earlier poems. Take the two last 
 verses of the Ode to a Nightingale : 
 
 Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird ! 
 
 No hungry generations tread thee down ; 
 The voice I hear this passing night was heard 
 
 In ancient days by emperor and clown : 
 Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 
 
 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, 
 She stood in tears amid the alien corn ; 
 The same that oft-times hath 
 Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 
 
 Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell 
 
 To toll me back from thee to my sole self! 
 Adieu ! the fancy cannot cheat so well 
 As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf! 
 Adieu ! adieu ! thy plaintive anthem fades 
 Past the near meadows, over the still stream. 
 Up the hill-side ; and now 'tis buried deep 
 In the next valley-glades : 
 Was it a vision, or a waking dream ? 
 
 Fled is that music : — do I wake or sleep ? 
 
 How different it is ! This is no butterfly work, 
 flying from one thing to another, always tasting, 
 never resting. Keats and the nightingale are one ; 
 it is his soul that sings in the bird, his music that 
 passes away over the hill. Into nature has now, 
 penetrated the tragedy of man. Yet it was not for 
 long. The passion was deep while it lasted, but 
 it seemed to him unworthy of the manifold ness of 
 beauty to linger in it. There was so great an in- 
 finity in the beauty of the world that to mingle up 
 
220 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 in its pursuit the delaying pressure of the sorrow of 
 humanity was not right for him. He was bound to 
 leave behind him this phase, in which humanity was 
 added to nature, for new loveliness unstained by 
 human pain. 
 
 ' I look not for happiness if it be not in the 
 present hour. Nothing startles me beyond the 
 moment. The setting sun will always set me to 
 rights, or if a sparrow were before my window I 
 take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel. 
 The first thing that strikes me on hearing a mis- 
 fortune having befallen another, is this, — Well, it 
 cannot be helped, he will have the pleasure of trying 
 the resources of his spirit.' 
 
 This life in the moment, and in the momentary 
 joy and movement of all things in nature, was the 
 source of his directness in description. He was 
 wholly in the place, and in the time, and with the 
 thing of which he wrote ; not confused by thoughts 
 of how the trees would look in winter if he saw 
 them in spring, or how the clouds in the sky might 
 be arranged to-morrow ; still less confused by any 
 imputation of his own feelings to nature. In earlier 
 days he did use what Ruskin calls the pathetic 
 fallacy, but not now. What was^ was enough, nay 
 more than he wanted; — and it is our want of 
 imagination, of copiousness of heart, of clear sight 
 and of fulness of life, that sends us into the past 
 or into the future or into our own soul, when 
 we are in the midst of any present beauty. I 
 think it is due to this unconfusion of impression 
 
KEATS 221 
 
 that Keats's imagination has room and capacity to 
 make those fine impersonations of nature which 
 since Spenser have never been so well done. In 
 truth they are finer than those of Spenser. If he 
 had been worried as Coleridge was with considering 
 his past ; if he had been tormented like Byron with 
 his own unpleasant present ; if he had had a philo- 
 sophic theory of nature like Wordsworth or Shelley 
 to steal in and out of his imagination, he could never 
 have realised so well the very life of autumn, the 
 everyday wanderings and fancies of the third spirit 
 of the year. 
 
 Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store ? 
 
 Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find 
 Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, 
 
 Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind ; 
 Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, 
 
 Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 
 
 Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers : 
 And sometime like a gleaner, thou dost keep 
 
 Steady thy laden head across a brook ; 
 
 Or by a cyder-press, with patient look. 
 
 Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. 
 
 ' Where are the songs of Spring ? ' he fancies that some 
 one asks. ^ Ay, where are they ? ' Keats answers in 
 half-sarcastic fashion. Why talk now of spring ? 
 we are in autumn ; 
 
 Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, 
 
 and he flies into a vivid description of the soul of 
 the season. This joy in the present, this isolation 
 of the beauty of the hour, this making of it a divine 
 
222 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 possession, and losing in its loveliness the pain of 
 life, is one of the chief marks of his genius. 
 
 ' In truth the great elements we know of are no mean 
 comforters ; the open sky sits on our senses like a sapphire 
 crown ; the air is our robe of state ; the earth is our 
 throne, and the sea a mighty minstrel playing before it, 
 able, like David's harp, to make such a one as you forget 
 almost the tempest cares of life. I have found in the 
 ocean music — varying (the self-same) more than the 
 passion of Timotheus — an enjoyment not to be put into 
 words.' — 
 
 If we think that Keats ought not to have been 
 content with this ; that he ought to have added to 
 enjoyment science, balanced beauty with a weight 
 of knowledge ; the answer is that he was, in one 
 half of his nature, not content with it. He did 
 desire to add knowledge to beauty, to find truth at 
 one with loveliness, to feel with man's tragedy while 
 he enjoyed the universe. We meet this desire again 
 and again in his letters ; and when the knowledge 
 he sought for was the knowledge of more beauty in 
 the great stories of mankind, in the great tragedy 
 of the passions of men, it was right to seek for it. 
 But to know things that were not beautiful would 
 have done him no good. The thoughts he had 
 that this life of his was idle were idle thoughts. It 
 might be said of Keats — They also serve who only 
 feel and love. There are those v^ho are like the 
 lilies of the field, who by being beautiful teach the 
 world what beauty is, and they bring as much bless- 
 ing and good to others as the great workers do who 
 
KEATS 223 
 
 face and heal the miseries of men. They, like Keats, 
 think often they ought to be up and doing work, 
 and sharing in the tra gedy of life. But they have 
 not that power, and if they leave their own work for 
 the other work, they make the great mistake.^ They 
 cannot help practically, dreadful disease and pain and 
 misery, and these terrible things disturb and injure 
 the delicate nature by which they, in their own way, 
 heal and comfort the world. They ought to cling 
 to their own nature, and live it out for that part of 
 the world which their nature- is fit to help. If they 
 live only in selfish seclusion of thought, without 
 any impulse of love, they lose their power. With- 
 out love the finest nature in the world rots away. 
 But if a tender love of being beautiful like the lilies 
 of the field, and of manifesting beauty for the sake 
 of the world — in order to help, delight, and console 
 the weary, to bring the power of loving loveliness 
 to those who are blind — if this be at the root of 
 their life and work, as it was with Keats, then the 
 less they have to do with fierce and terrible misery, 
 and the less knowledge they have of it, the better. 
 Let them keep to the exercise of their own powers. 
 If they do not, they will lose or weaken those powers. 
 When Keats allowed himself to strive for knowledge 
 of the tragedy of man, he was not strong enough for 
 it, and his poetic power lost its full beauty. The 
 recast of Hyperion is a sad example of this. When 
 he met the misery of a futile love, and the misery of 
 a fatal disease, his nature and his poetry broke down 
 into failure and silence. It is the high vocation of 
 
224 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 some to be a lily of the field. It Is at their peril 
 that they wish to be an ear of wheat. 
 
 When Keats was as yet untroubled he saw this 
 clearly. One night he fretted after knowledge, but 
 with the morning came better and truer thoughts. 
 He heard the thrush singing outside his window, 
 and the thrush told him true. 
 
 O fret not after knowledge ! I have none, 
 And yet my song comes native with the warmth. 
 O fret not after knowledge ! I have none, 
 And yet the evening listens. He who saddens 
 At thought of idleness cannot be idle. 
 And he 's awake who thinks himself asleep. 
 
 All the world is sorry that he could not have 
 escaped from this cruel knowledge. Illness came, 
 and ill-fortuned passion, and the weight of the 
 world's distress. This bright Faun of poetry felt 
 the pain whose only healing is immortality. 
 
 The pursuit by Keats of beauty In nature, and 
 of the truth of it, was in accord with the poetic 
 tendency of his time. To love nature for her own 
 sake had now become one of the impulses, one 
 of the special qualities of English song. And he 
 studied nature in England, though he wrote of it in 
 other lands and times. Through all his work — 
 In Endymion^ In Hyperion^ everywhere — the scenery 
 Is English scenery. If ever any one among our 
 poets studied nature In the open, and not In the 
 studio, it was Keats. More directly, more con- 
 cisely, with less of encumbering theories, self- 
 
KEATS 225 
 
 thoughts, symbolic fancies, than either Wordsworth, 
 Shelley, Coleridge, or Byron, he drew directly from 
 nature herself. 
 
 To find this beauty was easy to him. He had 
 great powers for its discovery. He had a deep 
 tenderness, subtle sensibility, and nothing escaped 
 his quick and observing eyes. What was seen, 
 instantly awoke its corresponding emotion. In 
 one moment his heart rose to welcome the new 
 guest, and to surround it with images which multi- 
 plied like a crowd about it. But that power is 
 not enough to make a poet. There are hundreds 
 who possess it, and cannot use it. But what Keats 
 saw and felt he could shape, and with swiftness and 
 rapture. Then, he had multitudes of words at hand, 
 all clamouring to be used, and he could select the 
 fittest and the most magical. There are fine sur- 
 prises of charming expression which meet us con- 
 tinually in Endymion when he is writing about nature, 
 and which in spite of the faults of that poem make 
 it a delightful companion. Nor did the power — an 
 unchartered, dissipated power — shown in Endymion 
 remain as it was then. It freed itself from its 
 weaknesses. It grew nobly, and into splendour. 
 There is, in his later work on nature, a great 
 nobility of phrase, of a strange enchanting simpli- 
 city, as if nature herself had discovered the right 
 word for him, which is the reason, I suppose, why 
 Matthew Arnold has said that he is with Shake- 
 speare. In that, perhaps, with Shakespeare ! But 
 in the rest ? — and how much is that rest ! 
 
226 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 I give one example of this high simplicity, direct- 
 ness, conciseness, and strange beauty in description 
 of nature — Shakespeare could not have bettered it, 
 but of what use is such comparison ? It is different 
 at every point from Shakespeare's way. It is Keats, 
 and of no other temper and style than his. More- 
 over, it is essentially modern. There are centuries 
 between its method and manner and those of the 
 natural description of Shakespeare. Lorenzo's ghost 
 is speaking and tells of his grave. 
 
 Saying moreover, ' Isabel, my sweet ! 
 
 Red whortle-berries droop above my head, 
 And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet ; 
 
 Around me beeches and high chestnuts shed 
 Their leaves and prickly nuts ; a sheep-fold bleat 
 
 Comes from beyond the river to my bed : 
 Go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom. 
 And it shall comfort me within the tomb.' 
 
 Then, starting from those last two lines, and in his 
 later way of work, he weaves in and out with the land- 
 scape the sorrow of humanity. The quiet scene is 
 now veiled with deep regret and lonely pain. Shake- 
 speare did not do this. He fitted his landscape to 
 the passions of his characters and his subject ; but 
 the landscape was not part of them ; it was a 
 background only, suitable, but distinct. But here 
 Lorenzo's sorrow pervades the scenery. 
 
 * I am a shadow now, alas ! alas ! 
 
 Upon the skirts of human nature dwelling 
 Alone : I chant alone the holy mass. 
 
 While little sounds of life are round me knelling. 
 
KEATS 227 
 
 And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass, 
 
 And many a chapel bell the hour is telling, 
 Paining me through : those sounds grow strange to me, 
 And thou art distant in Humanity.' 
 
 The lines have their own mystic, magic beauty of 
 thought, of images, of sound ; but how unlike Shake- 
 speare, how essentially his own ! The atmosphere 
 which they create is not of this earth, but of the 
 world of vision ; and their voice is ghostly, high, 
 thin, clear, not to be heard of mortal ear, unless in 
 dreams. 
 
 Along with these qualities he had another 
 special quality of genius ; it was a swiftness, almost 
 an unexampled swiftness, of giving form to the 
 things that he imagined. It is told of the Ode to 
 a Nightingale that it was begun and finished in two 
 or three hours after breakfast. The dedication to 
 the volume of Poems was written while his friends 
 waited. Some of his finest work came in a moment 
 in language as natural as ' leaves to a tree.' ' I 
 have, for the most part,' he says, ' dashed off my 
 lines in a hurry.' Such swiftness rarely produces 
 good work. But when the work is good, as with 
 Mozart whose speed was astonishing, it proves 
 genius of a very high power. Few poets have 
 combined swiftness and excellence. Shelley did so 
 rarely ; he corrected and re-corrected his first drafts. 
 But Keats poured out noble poetry, in lovely form, 
 in an hour or two. The Ode to a ISightingale is 
 scarcely changed from the original draft; — and 
 such swiftness with excellence is a wonderful thing. 
 
228 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 It is the carelessness of one who had a thousand 
 poems within him ; whose inward waters were so 
 full and copious that he felt no need to store up 
 those he had created. 
 
 We may trace, also, this predominant love and 
 pursuit of beauty through his poetic work on 
 humanity. Keats loved to find beauty in the great 
 romantic tales of the world, in the days and deeds 
 of chivalry, into whose spacious realm, among en- 
 chanted forests where knights and maidens met, 
 and satyrs of Greece and fairies of a later world 
 abode together, Spenser led him when he was young. 
 But he did not imitate Spenser ; he did not mingle 
 together the Greek and the mediaeval world. He 
 had been ^in love before, and it was with the 
 beautiful mythology of Greece.' Therefore we had 
 first Endymton^ with a love story of a goddess and 
 a shepherd in woods and caves and mountain 
 meadows. And, as if that were not enough, he 
 led us in the poem through the depths of the sea, 
 to pity all the lovers who had died in its cold 
 waters, and to rejoice at their resurrection. Then 
 we were taken into the darker side of human life 
 in Greece, the weird and later legend of Lamia ; 
 where the ancient serpent superstition which came 
 from the Aryan home is linked to the love of woman, 
 to the decay of sensuous joy, to the misery of fate. 
 The reason of the world is against the isolation 
 sensuous passion creates ; and its beauty challenges 
 doom. When science concentrates this reason of 
 
KEATS 229 
 
 the world, without pity, on such beauty, it withers 
 away. Those are the thoughts of it, and in it 
 Keats went deep into the heart of men when they 
 are young. 
 
 Then came Hyperion^ a more solemn poem, as if 
 the awe of his own fate brooded over him, the 
 tragedy of a great ruin, the sorrow of gods dis- 
 possessed. Byron was not very wrong when he 
 said it was like jEschylus. Like ^schylus in a 
 way — in a certain antique grandeur of conception, 
 but in all the thinking and feeling, in all the scenery, 
 and in the overladen verse, as unlike ^schylus as 
 possible. All through it, also, more soft and sweeter 
 beauty, more of beauty for its own sake, a greater 
 cry for it, a greater passionateness of expression 
 than ever belonged to any of the ancients, to whom 
 depth of humanity was more than any loveliness, 
 to whom the long-winding music of Keats would 
 have seemed intemperate. 
 
 Mingled with these Greek stories were other 
 stories, nearer at hand, where he pursued beauty 
 into the tales of romance, of romantic sorrow in 
 Isabella, of romantic joy in St. Agnes Eve, both 
 warm throughout, one with the love which dies of 
 love, the other with the love which lives for love. 
 
 And all these stories were to him alive with the 
 beauty of great humanity. But while he pursued 
 this beauty in far-off, lovely stories of human passion, 
 it came into his mind, that as he should not have 
 neglected knowledge when he was dreaming of love- 
 liness in nature, so he ought not to neglect, when 
 
230 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 following beauty in human lives, to speak directly 
 of the moral and spiritual life which was at the 
 top of things, nor fail in that sympathy with all 
 humanity which had belonged to the imperial poets, 
 and which, were he to become great, should also 
 belong to him. Many phrases which speak of this 
 thought occur in his letters. I am not all I ought 
 to be, he seems to say, I am but one of the lower 
 poets, for I am not moved enough with the pains 
 and joys of all men. My love of beauty makes me 
 want sympathy. I am less than the great ones of 
 the earth, because I have not communion enough 
 with men. Unlike Shelley, then, who, as he lived 
 longer, wished to recede from men, Keats looked 
 forward to doing work which should bring him 
 closer to men. It is the mark of his greatness of 
 character that he saw so clearly what his poetry 
 needed to make him the lofty poet. 
 
 Forgetting the great end 
 
 Of Poesy, that it should be a friend 
 
 To soothe the cares and Hft the thought of men. 
 
 There is a passage in the second version of 
 Hyperion which puts clearly this position of his soul. 
 He enters, in his dream, into a vast sanctuary, and 
 sees a veiled goddess enthroned at the top of a lofty 
 flight of steps, and hears a voice which says : 
 
 If thou canst not ascend 
 These steps, die on the marble where thou art. 
 
 The goddess is she who in the first Hyperion has 
 been Mnemosyne, who teaches Apollo how to sing 
 
KEATS 231 
 
 the fates of men which she remembers. She is then 
 Memory and Poesy combined ; and to reach her feet 
 and receive her inspiration is to become a poet. 
 But here she is called Moneta, and the name 
 suggests one who warns and teaches the poet to be 
 at one with all the passions of men, with their strife 
 for the highest, with their daily life. Keats pictures 
 himself as scarcely worthy or able to approach her, 
 because he has not enough of humanity in his work. 
 He almost dies before he mounts the steps. But 
 because he has not only lived for beauty and for 
 himself with her, but has also, even in this self- 
 isolation, desired greatly to leave himself behind and 
 to sing the fates of men, to love the spirit of beauty 
 in human sorrow and joy — he, though a dreamer, 
 does not die upon the floor of the temple, but 
 looks into Moneta's eyes that he may receive her 
 power. Here are the lines in which he sketches 
 himself : 
 
 * Holy Power,' 
 Cried I, approaching near the horned shrine, 
 
 * What am I that should so be saved from death ? 
 What am I that another death come not 
 
 To choke my utterance, sacrilegious, here ? ' 
 
 Then said the veilM shadow : * Thou hast felt 
 
 What 'tis to die and live again before 
 
 Thy fated hour ; that thou hast power to do so 
 
 Is thine own safety ; thou hast dated on 
 
 Thy doom.' * High Prophetess,' said I, < purge off, 
 
 Benign, if so it please thee, my mind's film.' 
 
 « None can usurp this height,' returned that shade, 
 
 * But those to whom the miseries of the world 
 Are misery, and will not let them rest. 
 
232 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 All else who find a haven in the world, 
 
 Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, 
 
 If by a chance into this fame they come, 
 
 Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half.' 
 
 < Are there not thousands in the world,' said I, 
 
 Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade, 
 
 ' Who love their fellows even to the death. 
 
 Who feel the giant agony of the world 
 
 And more, like slaves to poor humanity. 
 
 Labour for mortal good ? I sure should see 
 
 Other men here, but I am here alone.' 
 
 ' Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries,' 
 
 Rejoin'd that voice, ' they are no dreamers weak ; 
 
 They seek no wonder but the human face 
 
 No music but a happy-noted voice : 
 
 They come not here, they have no thought to come ; 
 
 And thou art here, for thou art less than they. 
 
 What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe. 
 
 To the great world ? Thou art a dreaming thing, 
 
 A fever of thyself: think of the earth; 
 
 What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee ? 
 
 What haven ? every creature hath its home. 
 
 Every sole man hath days of joy and pain. 
 
 Whether his labours be sublime or low — 
 
 The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct : 
 
 Only the dreamer venoms all his days. 
 
 Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. 
 
 Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shared, 
 
 Such things as thou art are admitted oft 
 
 Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile. 
 
 And suffered in these temples : for that cause 
 
 Thou standest safe beneath this statue's knees.' 
 
 This was his image of himself as a poet when he 
 had finished Hyperion^ and, in passionate desire to 
 reach that higher level of song, where humanity is 
 the theme, he cries — 
 
KEATS 233 
 
 Shade of Memory ! 
 Let me behold, according as thou saidst, 
 What in thy brain so ferments to and fro. 
 
 What ferments there is the whole history of the past 
 of man — that mighty tale which Keats desired to 
 write, but had not yet the power. It is to begin 
 with the history of the fall of the Titans, and the 
 advent to power of the gods of Greece — the con- 
 quest of a lesser beauty by a higher — and Keats 
 now begins, after this new preamble, the recast of 
 what he had already done in Hyperion. The recast 
 broke off suddenly ; he had not the heart to go on 
 with it. But in the original poem we are carried 
 on to the meeting of Apollo with Mnemosyne, of 
 the god of poetry with the goddess who holds in 
 her memory the whole history of mankind, and holds 
 it in a sympathy as vast as her knowledge of it. 
 
 Keats, in the words of Apollo, there describes the 
 passion for knowledge of all human history which 
 has seized on him, and of which he desires to sing ; 
 but chiefly for knowledge of what men have done 
 and suffered, created and destroyed, aspired to and 
 failed in. He is torn and rent by the passion of it. 
 The goddess, merciless to his pain that he may reach 
 creative joy, fills his aching and fearless ignorance 
 with her memories — and what Apollo cries is what 
 Keats desired to feel : 
 
 Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. 
 Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions. 
 Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, 
 Creations and destroyings, all at once 
 
234 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, 
 And deify me, as if some blithe wine 
 Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk. 
 And so become immortal. 
 
 He would be impassioned with humanity. Never- 
 theless he recognised that this was not yet his path ; 
 that he must wait for greater strength. He had 
 seen a higher ideal, and, with that grave modesty 
 that belonged to him, resolved to pursue it, but 
 not yet. It was an envious fate that forbade the 
 world that pleasure and that use. Yet I doubt he 
 would have had the power to reach the heights he 
 saw. There was not enough iron in his nature. It 
 may have been well that he died so saon. 
 
 With all this new aspiration he had not let go his 
 clear conception that beauty, such as he conceived it 
 — the abstract idea of beauty in all things — was the 
 summit and crown of all a poet's aim. But he now 
 identified beauty with truth, and out of them, when 
 together and at one, proceeded power. All things 
 must bow to the highest beauty. When it was seen, 
 truth was seen and power came. That was his last 
 thought ; that the law of the whole universe. And 
 splendidly he expressed it in Hyperion. 
 
 Saturn the dethroned goes to visit his brother 
 Titans in the vast cave where they lie, fallen and 
 desolate, after their overthrow by the younger gods, 
 and he asks their counsel. They rise one after 
 another to speak, and all their speech is of wonder 
 and anger at their ruin. At last Oceanus, in whose 
 face Saturn, astonished, sees severe content, takes a 
 
KEATS 235 
 
 different view, and his thought is the finest motive 
 in Hyperion. In it Keats also declares his inmost 
 thought. Oceanus tells the Titans that they must 
 be content to fall ; and that, when they have seen the 
 reason of their overthrow, they will arrive at the 
 rigid truth, and in grasping truth be satisfied, as he 
 is satisfied. They have fallen by course of nature's 
 law, not by their conquerors : 
 
 Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain ; 
 O folly ! for to bear all naked truths, 
 And to envisage circumstance, all calm, 
 That is the top of sovereignty. 
 
 And this is the law — that as Heaven and Earth 
 overthrew Chaos and Darkness because they were 
 fairer than Chaos and Darkness, and we, the Titans, 
 overthrew Heaven and Earth because we were more 
 beautiful than they. 
 
 So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, 
 A power more strong in beauty, born of us 
 And fated to excel us. 
 
 Our dispossessors tower above us in loveliness, 
 therefore they 
 
 must reign 
 In right thereof; for 'tis the eternal law 
 That first in beauty should be first in might. 
 
 Then he breaks out, impassioned, eager to prove 
 his point : 
 
 Have ye beheld the young God of the Seas, 
 My dispossessor ? Have ye seen his face ? 
 Have ye beheld his chariot, foam'd along 
 By noble winged creatures he hath made 
 
236 STUDIES IN POETRY ' 
 
 I saw him on the calmed waters scud, 
 With such a glow of beauty in his eyes, 
 That it enforced me to bid sad farewell 
 To all my empire : farewell sad I took. 
 And hither came, to see how dolorous fate 
 Had wrought upon ye ; and how I might best 
 Give consolation in this woe extreme. 
 Receive the truth, and let it be your balm. 
 
 Impossible to resist that loveliness ! It forced him 
 to give way ; he accepted the truth of things. 
 
 Still finer, on the same thought, is the wild, sad 
 speech of Clymene. She does not argue, like 
 Oceanus, with the philosophy of fatalism, but she 
 feels the same truth. The beauty which is beyond 
 her power to create, breaks her heart with pain, and 
 breaks it again with joy. She hears Apollo play, 
 and as she hears, she knows, since the music is 
 lovelier than aught the Titans can make, that all 
 hope of empire is gone from them for ever. 
 
 Standing on a pleasant shore, Clymene took a 
 shell, and breathed into it the music of their woes, 
 when suddenly 
 
 from a bowery strand 
 Just opposite, an island of the sea, 
 There came enchantment with the shifting wind, 
 That did both drown and keep alive my ears. 
 I threw my shell away upon the sand, 
 And a wave filled it, as my sense was fill'd 
 With that new blissful golden melody. 
 
 Joy filled her with its beauty, then grief conquered 
 joy, for in its beauty she felt the doom of all she 
 loved, and then a voice came, 
 
KEATS 237 
 
 sweeter than all tune. 
 And still it cried, * Apollo ! young Apollo ! 
 The morning-bright Apollo ! young Apollo ! ' 
 
 and she fled away, knowing that loveliness had 
 overcome their world. 
 
 In the last book the same thought occurs again. 
 We find Mnemosyne in Delos, watching over the 
 youth of Apollo. She has left the Titans, ravished 
 with his beauty, to add all her ancient power to his 
 tuneful youth. 
 
 Show thy heart's secret to an ancient Power 
 Who hath forsaken old and sacred thrones 
 For prophecies of thee, and for the sake 
 Of loveliness new-born. 
 
 Beauty, then, and power are linked together. 
 Where there is the highest beauty there is of neces- 
 sity the greatest power. It is the instinct of all 
 spirits to bow unquestioning to beauty, if they have 
 the heart to see it. This is Keats's second law. 
 The first is that truth and beauty are one. Yet the 
 two laws are one law. For beauty is the form that 
 truth takes — its eternal Logos ; and when all the 
 world, feeling its supremacy, acknowledges and 
 worships perfect beauty, it acknowledges and wor- 
 ships the divine essence out of which beauty rises 
 into form — the essence of absolute truth. That 
 was the last thought of Keats upon this matter — 
 truth, beauty, power — a co-equal trinity. 
 
 Of the earlier poems of 1 8 1 7 there is not much 
 
238 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 to say. They proclaim the influence of Spenser, 
 Chapman, Milton, Fletcher, Browne, Chatterton, 
 and far too much of Leigh Hunt — a good and 
 faithful friend^ — upon him. They prove him to 
 have been alive at every point to impressions on all 
 the senses, and these impressions are expressed with 
 a minute and rejoicing skill, and frequently with an 
 exquisiteness which, though it continually ran into 
 sentimentalism, prophesied in lovely and concinnate 
 lines the future and almost unique excellence of his 
 poetic wording. Even before he finished these 
 poems, there are not only many lines, but even 
 whole poem^like the noble sonnet to Chapman's 
 Homer, whim tell us that he was not only escaping 
 from a false and fantastic sentimentalism, from a 
 vulgar treatment of love and of womanhood, from 
 an over-lusciousness of epithet and versing, into a 
 stronger, truer, more critical, more tender, more 
 thoughtful art, but also that his view of what ought 
 to be done by poetry, and felt by the poet, what he 
 ought to love, aim at, and delight in, had entirely 
 changed. He desired knowledge with which to 
 weight poetry, and sympathy with humanity with 
 which to make it tender with love, rich with the 
 
 giving of pleasure — 
 
 a friend 
 To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of men. 
 
 All his thoughts on this matter are detailed in Sleep 
 and Poetry^ the last of the poems of this first volume. 
 He realised that this lofty aim should be his, but he 
 was as yet unable to fulfil it. Beauty alone had as yet 
 
KEATS 239 
 
 an exclusive power over him, and Endymioftj with all 
 its Ideal aim, does not fulfil or embody his aspiration. 
 It has been analysed and represented as an 
 allegory. I do not think the poem was written 
 with that intention, but what he thought and felt as 
 he wrote may perhaps be fairly wrought by others 
 into an allegory. ' Before I began I had no inward 
 feeling,' Keats says, ' of being able to finish ; as I pro- 
 ceeded my steps were all uncertain.' And the whole 
 of the poem is a confirmation of this statement. It 
 bears the same relation to a well-constructed poem 
 that a gipsy's wanderings bear to an ordered voyage 
 with a single aim. The gipsy wearies at last and 
 rests, and so does Keats. The last book of the 
 poem is quite inferior, with a few exceptions, to the 
 others. The faults of bad taste, carelessness, and 
 indifference are more glaring than in the previous 
 books, and the conception of the subject and its 
 treatment are not only troubled, but wrong in art. 
 It is plain that Keats was weary of this work of his. 
 Yet In the very midst of it, is that song of the Indian 
 maid, describing the conquest of the East by Bacchus 
 and his crew, enriched with glowing colour, reminis- 
 cent of Titian's picture, full of the energy of genius, 
 and enraptured, as It were, with its own melodies. 
 There is no weariness in it, as in the rest of the 
 book. Out of that weariness proceeded the Preface 
 of the poem. It Is a model of quiet, even of stately, 
 self-judgment ; conscious of power, but of power 
 which had not been sufficiently educated ; conscious 
 too that in writing Endymion he had learnt his faults. 
 
240 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 and was now capable of better work. No criticism 
 of the poem can be truer than that which he made 
 himself In this Preface, with a steadfast good sense 
 as rare as it is interesting. 
 
 Yet, in spite of all such criticism, it seems almost 
 incredible that there were persons who had no ears 
 for the melody of the poem, and no apprehension of 
 the pure gold of poetry lavished through it with a 
 reckless, unrestrained profusion. It is full of noble 
 passages, like the brief, solemn appearance of Cybele, 
 like the dell where Endymion and Peona speak, like 
 the great ocean cavern, places and images which 
 Keats saw more clearly than he saw an earthly land- 
 scape, and, seeing, had the power to paint them. 
 It is full of lovely, isolated lines, far, far above in 
 power and beauty those in which they are embedded ; 
 prophetic of the Odes ; strong or sweet, soft as 
 grass, sonorous as thunder, which, as they fall on 
 the ear, seem to live and breathe with the life of that 
 they celebrate. A few have passed into common 
 quotation, but there are many hidden away like 
 violets in their leaves — and there are too many 
 leaves. The Hymn to Pan, in the first book, ought 
 to have been enough to tell the critics that an 
 original poet had arisen in England. It may be a 
 little too long, but he would be a bold man who 
 should wish any of it away. Even where it is weak 
 it is marked by that imaginative excellence of im- 
 personation of the powers of nature in which Keats 
 excelled. It prophesies the greatness and beauty of 
 the Odes he was to write hereafter. 
 
KEATS 241 
 
 When he published again it was with Lamia^ 
 Isabella^ The Eve of St. Agnes^ and Other Poems^ in 
 1820. Lamia and Hyperion {Hyperion closes the 
 volume) return to Greek subjects ; Isabella and St. 
 Agnes s Eve belong to mediasval story. 
 
 When we pass from Endymion to Lamia we pass 
 from an ill-constructed, over-fantastic poem to a 
 poem in which the construction is excellent and the 
 divagations of the fancy strictly limited. Keats had 
 become a conscious artist^ comprehending and obey- 
 ing the laws of his art. It was, of course, natural 
 that he should grow into this, but he was much helped 
 thereto by his study of Dryden, whose Fables are 
 excellent models of the construction and conduct of 
 the narrative poem. Every now and then we hear 
 in the verse the 'loud resounding pace' of the steeds 
 whose necks were ' clothed in thunder.' 
 
 The story is Greek enough, and belongs to that 
 strange underworld of nature where Greek super- 
 stition, among the ignorant, feared, and luxuriated 
 — a world of strange metamorphoses or ghastly 
 terrors whose indwellers enslaved or maddened the 
 minds of men. The woman who became a serpent 
 and who could become a woman again, who en- 
 thralled with love the mortal she loved, and built 
 around him a world of illusion, was one of these. 
 This fatal witch, her piteous passion and its miser- 
 able close, seized on the imagination of Keats. He 
 added to it pity and love ; pity for the serpent- 
 woman because she loved, as well as for her lover to 
 whom her love brought death. He added to her 
 
242 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 I 
 
 also a strange psychical power. While she lay 
 couched in her forest brake, she had power to send 
 forth her spirit from herself where she willed, over 
 all the worlds of gods and men, and to bring back 
 to her lonely dwelling all she saw and felt in her 
 wanderings. This Keats invented for her, and it 
 lifts her above the commonplace of superstition into 
 spiritual power, and dignifies the poem. It is also 
 interesting to see what the story becomes when 
 passed through the modern imagination of Keats 
 and through his childlike ignorance of classic life 
 and the classic temper. It is extraordinarily naif, 
 and in this naivete it is perhaps nearer to Greek 
 reality than a scholar would have made it, whose 
 knowledge would have troubled and complicated his 
 execution. The story remains quite simple in the 
 verse of Keats. 
 
 Only twice or thrice does a modern note intrude 
 and jar, and all the more because the note has that 
 strange vulgarity which sometimes jumps up like a 
 demon in Keats's poetry. It seems incredible that 
 he should have written these passages, much more 
 that he should not have erased them. There are 
 also here and there romantic borrowings, that is, 
 borrowing not from real romance, but from his own 
 shaping of romance, so that we seem to hear an echo 
 from Isabella or from St. Agnes' s Eve, But for the 
 most part it is quite Greek enough to place us in 
 Corinth among the unphilosophic people, who lived 
 in wealthy houses and indulged their senses with 
 beauty and knew not our moralities. Its charming 
 
KEATS 243 
 
 opening, with the tale of Hermes and the invisible 
 nymph, shows how rapidly Keats had grown in power 
 of noble versing, and In restraint of fancy, and in 
 omission of the needless, since he wrote Endymion ; 
 and the excellence Is steady from the beginning to 
 the end. So much has been written, and so well, 
 on its melodious, lovely, and surprising phrasing, that 
 it is unnecessary to dwell upon this, but I do not 
 know if enough attention has been drawn to Keats's 
 curious love of colour, which, subtle and Inquisitive 
 In Endymion^ Is almost rapturous in The Eve of St, 
 Agnes^ and, in jets. In Lamia. It Is not, however, 
 so much the colour of the landscape or the sky on 
 which he dwells, as the colour of jewels and tapes- 
 tries, and illuminated books and dress, and fruits, 
 and rich dark woods In panelled rooms. He has 
 the same pleasure In these things as Morris and 
 Rossetti had, and the same power of describing 
 them. It Is almost with exultation that he describes 
 In Lamia the colours of the serpent and those of 
 the hall decorated for the marriage. Every one 
 knows the colour-music of the scene In Madeline's 
 chamber. In Endymion the colour-painting shares 
 In the confused extravagance of the rest of the 
 poem. It Is flung here and there without order or 
 clearness, with no sense of ' values.' In Hyperion 
 it Is In harmony with the subject ; and In the Odes 
 and Sonnets It Is lovely. 
 
 Isabella^ or The Pot of Basil is taken from a story 
 In the Decameron. It Is strange to contrast Its over- 
 sugared sentiment with the frank and masculine 
 
244 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 way in which Boccaccio tells the tale. The contrast 
 favours the Italian, but In the difference lies this ad- 
 vantage — that the version of Keats Is made thereby- 
 original. He has reconcelved the characters, brought 
 into the story a new temper of the mind. Invented 
 a new scenery, and wrapt it round and round with a 
 subtle, separate, scented atmosphere which enters Into 
 every line of the poem, and isolates into Its special air 
 the Imagination of every reader. The rhythm of the 
 verse, the arrangement of words, the language used, 
 the style, which Is subtly different from that of ^he 
 Eve of St, Agnes^ are all charged heavily with the 
 same peculiar sentiment. This settles the poem into 
 an artistic unity. There are flaws, however, in this 
 unity. The description of the brothers as men of 
 dreadful greed, as manufacturers who drove their 
 labourers all over the world to death, is quite un- 
 medlaeval and places us in modern England and 
 America. The talk of Lorenzo and Isabella is 
 sometimes quite below the just level of poetry, and 
 there is one terrible stanza. But these are sllglit 
 stains, and though they jar, they jar chiefly because 
 the rest is so curiously beautiful in feeling and in 
 expression. 
 
 The poem is passionate enough, but the passion 
 is felt by two weak characters, and shares In their 
 feebleness. It has great pathos but no strength, 
 wild emotion but not deep emotion. The two 
 lovers were too weak in character to reach the 
 depths of passion. But this is rather an excellence 
 than a fault in the artist. He had conceived them 
 
KEATS 245 
 
 as weak. Had their passion been profound, it would 
 not have fitted their characters. Keats has kept 
 them carefully within the limits of their nature ; but 
 within those limits their passion — with a few start- 
 ling exceptions where the language becomes too 
 ' precious ' — is of a curious, lonely, perfumed, and 
 forlorn loveliness which is brought up to the edge 
 of cloying, but does not pass over it. And this Is 
 done with exquisite and unconscious skill, and is 
 supported and strengthened by an equally exquisite 
 choice and use of words, as happy as they are sur- 
 prising. This power over noble, fitting, and sur- 
 prising words belongs to all his great poems, and it 
 is nowhere better than In The Eve of St. Jgnes. 
 
 That poem is of a finer quality than Isabella. In 
 Isabella^ Keats has written from one part of his 
 nature alone, from the part which tended to sentl- 
 mentalism in love and preciosity in expression — 
 abundance of which Is to be found In Endymion. 
 In Endymion the work is broken, unequal, over- 
 strained, but always poetical. In Isabella, all that 
 belonged to this part of his nature, all the elements 
 that found imperfect expression In Endymion^ are 
 expressed almost to perfection. It is a triumph In 
 this kind of verse, but the kind does not belong to 
 the nobler forms of poetry. 
 
 In T^he Eve of St. Agnes he still writes from this 
 side of his nature, but he writes also from the 
 stronger, healthier, and more joyous side. And the 
 mingling of the two, each confirming and balancing 
 the other, each entering like two spirits into his 
 
246 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 imagination, and working in it like Eros and 
 Bacchus — pure love and emancipating rapture — 
 hand in hand, has produced a poem, in which there 
 is no jarring note, of a singular loveliness, and in 
 one of those untrodden regions of the art, wherein so 
 many poets would fain enter, but have not the power. 
 The story has the immense merit of improbability. 
 We are in such a world as we find in the French 
 romances — set free, while we read, from the whole 
 of the modern world, and greatly blest thereby. 
 The scenery, the climate, the imaginative atmo- 
 sphere, were all created in the soul of Keats as his 
 subject seized it, and they entered into the verse, 
 into its every cadence, and never left it from end to 
 end. The poem is like a crystal sphere in which 
 changing imageries arise and pass away, incessantly 
 shifting ; and it is surrounded by an aura of its own 
 that isolates it in poetry. Indeed, this is a charac- 
 teristic of all the best poems of Keats, and is more 
 true of him than of other poets of his time, except 
 perhaps of Wordsworth when he is dwelling, as he 
 writes, in the innermost simplicity of his art. 
 
 In T^he Eve of St. Agnes the curious beauty of the 
 words, their natural selection, the survival of the 
 fittest, their out -of- the -world note, their sweet, 
 changeful, and elfin music, are in the closest harmony 
 with the romantic tale and its wild scenery, with 
 Porphyro riding across the moor with his heart on 
 fire, with Madeline, like Keats himself, * asleep in 
 lap of legends old.' The scenery is not described 
 but suggested, and follows the reader throughout 
 
KEATS 247 
 
 the poem. The bitter frost, the rising storm, the 
 bright moonlight seen at intervals through the 
 driving clouds of flaw-blown sleet, the wild wind 
 through which the lovers ride away over the black 
 moor, are heard, in happy contrast, outside the 
 warm chamber of Madeline, the quiet nest of 
 tender, pure, youthful passion ; and the silence and 
 ardour of it is set over against the rude stones of 
 the castle, the dying age of the beadsman and the 
 nurse, against the riotous feast and the shouting of 
 the hall. Every one has dwelt on the unpremedi- 
 tated excellence of the contrasts of the poem. 
 
 I suppose we may call it mediaeval. But it is 
 mediaevalism seen through the magical mist of the 
 imagination of Keats, and in the mist the nature of 
 Keats is playing like a child in a garden. There is 
 then a little air of modern feeling blowing hither 
 and thither through the mediaevalism. Being so 
 little, it does not injure the main impression, but 
 adds a touch of remote charm to it, a scent as from 
 a far-oflT land which comes and goes momentarily. 
 
 Above all these excellent things in beauty and 
 colour and force is the loving of the lovers, and the 
 scenery of its passion. It is the beating heart of the 
 poem. It needs no words to praise its ardour, 
 purity, and tenderness. And it is set in beauty. 
 It was daring of Keats to encompass it with such 
 elaborate scenery. The rich description of the 
 casement and its devices, of the moonlight pouring 
 through the dim room, of the ^ delicates ' aglow with 
 colour on cloths of woven crimson, gold, and jet, of 
 
248 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 perfumes, and tapestries, and music of the lute, 
 might, in other hands, have taken the reader too far 
 away from the lovers and their love, from the quint- 
 essence of the subject. But it does not ; it enhances 
 its beauty, it frames perfectly its tenderness. 
 
 It is a great pity that Keats did not finish the 
 other mediaeval poem he projected, of which we 
 have only about a hundred lines — The Eve of St. 
 Mark. In its rhythm, feeling, and manner it 
 is so like William Morris's work that it would 
 seem as if he had heard its melodies and seen its 
 pictures in his heart. The description of the 
 mediaeval city, of Bertha's room and its furniture 
 and books, of the minster seen from her window, 
 are as warm with the firelight and the scent of 
 ancient rooms, as the city streets, and arched 
 porches, and the pious folk travelling to the minster 
 service, are chill in the April evening. And Bertha, 
 within her panelled chamber, in which we breathe ' 
 the dim air of a quiet mediaeval home, is a still, 
 dreamy, shadow-haunted burgher-maiden, worthy 
 of her room, of her missal, and of the minster 
 square. Like all the finer poems of Keats, its 
 atmosphere is of an isolated and solitary beauty. 
 
 La Belle Dame sans merely which is not quite a 
 ballad, but which Keats, when he invented it, called 
 a * ditty ' and derived from Provence, recalls the 
 motive of the Tannhauser story, and belongs to his 
 imaginative mediasvalism. It is a beautiful, fantastic 
 thing, but it has been praised beyond its worth. 
 "^The skill with which each verse is closed by a line 
 
KEATS 249 
 
 of four strong syllables accents each step of the 
 tragic mystery. The poem suggests passion, but is 
 not passionate. Its magic strangeness is curiously 
 increased by lines which have no connection with 
 those that precede them — 
 
 O what can ail thee, Knight at arms, 
 So haggard and so woe-begone ? 
 
 The Squirrel's granary is full, 
 And the harvest 's done. 
 
 It is pure poetry, but not to be classed with 
 poems like the Ode to a Klightingale, It is, how- 
 ever, of a unique originality, and instinct with an 
 imagining power which — both in the landscape, in 
 the presentation of the faery woman into whom 
 the Venus of the Venus Berg has descended, and 
 in its wild mingling of the preternatural with the 
 natural, every detail of which is cumulative — awakens 
 wonder and pleasure in that region of the soul which 
 wanders from reality. 
 
 The best examples of the Odes need neither praise 
 nor blame. They are above criticism, pure gold of 
 poetry — virgin gold. Of them it may be said — with 
 all reverence yet with justice, for these high things 
 of poetry come forth from the spiritual depths of 
 man — The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou 
 canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth 
 — so is every poem that is born of the spirit. 
 
 As to Hyperion^ with which Keats's last volume 
 closed, it is nobly conceived and wonderfully sup- 
 ported. It is hard to write about the Titans titanic- 
 
250 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 ally, yet Keats has done it. The great figures of 
 Saturn, Oceanus, Hyperion, in stately ruin, remain 
 great and stately to the end. The images of the 
 younger gods, of Neptune and Apollo, with victory, 
 radiant joy, and beauty pouring forth from them on 
 all things like morning light, are in splendid contrast 
 to the giant sorrows of Saturn and his comrades. I 
 would give much to possess from Keats the meeting 
 of Apollo and Hyperion on the palace platform 
 before the gates. There would have been no battle. 
 Hyperion would have yielded, like Mnemosyne, to 
 loveliness, youth, and music — to incarnate Poetry. 
 But, if Keats were to write the rest in the same 
 temper as he wrote the recast of Hyperion^ I am 
 glad he did not finish it. I have dwelt on this 
 recast already. It is interesting as a revelation of 
 his aims as a poet, but it is a pity that he took to 
 self-analysis. Had it persisted it would have spoiled 
 his poetry. One of his greatest excellences was that 
 he lost himself in the objects he loved and in the^ 
 subjects which seized on his imagination ; and self- 
 analysis wears away the power of losing self in joy. 
 That excellence would have departed or been in- 
 jured. Nor has self-analysis any beauty in it, and 
 Keats, the lover of beauty, would have lost in con- 
 tact with himself the quintessence of his poetry. 
 As to his aims as a poet, also revealed in this recast, 
 they were more than he was capable of fulfilling. 
 They were an ideal which he early conceived. They 
 appear in Sleep and Poetry^ they are perhaps symbol- 
 ised in Endymion^ but he had the great good fortune, 
 
KEATS 251 
 
 in a time of health and natural vigour, to get rid of 
 them, and to write Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. 
 Agnes y and Hyperion without being troubled by them. 
 It was well for Keats to nourish the ideal he imaged 
 to himself; but it is also well to understand how 
 far one has capacity to realise it, how much of it our 
 personal powers enable us to embody, and, if one 
 is an artist, whether any embodiment of it in our 
 special art will not jar or interfere with that 
 which is most excellent in that art. Keats did not 
 consider this, or if he did, he was led away from 
 its consideration. He should have realised his 
 limits and been content with them. He never could 
 have become one of the imperial poets to whom 
 humanity was open to its depths. He felt that all 
 along. It was only at the close that he reproached 
 himself for not trying to do what he was unable 
 by nature to do. Had he not loved foolishly and 
 morbidly, had he been well in body, he would never 
 have written the beginning of the Fall of Hyperion, 
 and made the unhappy change of Mnemosyne into 
 Moneta. But ill-love and ill-health drove him 
 inside of himself; and therein, for all of us, there is 
 neither peace nor joy nor beauty. 
 
 But of the earlier Hyperion these things cannot be 
 said. It is written within his limits, and without 
 any serious purpose outside of the subject. Its 
 seriousness and purpose is in the subject, not 
 dragged into it from any ideal in some remote 
 chamber of the soul of Keats. It sees with the 
 clearest vision, and records in the clearest words 
 
252 STUDIES IN POETRY 
 
 the characters and the figures he conceives, and the 
 landscape In which they rest, and does not, as In 
 Endymion^ deviate Into side issues which worry the 
 impression of the whole. The care, the curious 
 choice of felicitous phrase, the rejection of all that 
 is needless, the concentration of images, the steady 
 level of the verse, and its elaborate but easy melodies, 
 show how very great in two or three years only 
 was the advance of Keats in his chosen art. They 
 represent not only its unceasing practice, but its 
 industrious, constant, and purposeful thought. 
 
 Even more noble than these artist-powers, are 
 the spiritual powers of the poem — invention which 
 almost never fails, imagination which creates and 
 shapes and burns like an unconsuming fire in the 
 landscape, in the characters. In their action, in their 
 speech; which seems to grasp the very life which 
 resides in words, and forces them to speak and move. 
 And through the whole, one thing is pre-eminent, 
 one thing subdues the too much and exalts the too 
 little, pervades, ennobles, penetrates, and bears the 
 whole into immortality — the love of Beauty, which 
 is the love of Love. 
 
 And then he passed away to find pure loveliness, 
 but the path by which he went was strewn with pain. 
 No end was more piteous than his, or more distress- 
 ful. Very sorrowful and bitter was his pain of 
 heart. As bitter was the slow suffering of his body. 
 Yet he was brave and patient at the close, and 
 always in love with things which were fair and 
 simple, of good report, gentle, of virtue, and worthy 
 
KEATS 253 
 
 of praise. As he drew near to death his mind grew 
 in quietness and peace. The tempest of his passion- 
 ate love ceased to blow within him. 
 
 Two friends alone, but they, as tender as Cor- 
 delia, lived for him and tended him to the last ; but 
 it is beyond all noble compassion to think that the 
 lover of beauty died in his youth, while as yet his 
 revelation to us was but begun. Yet loveliness was 
 in his heart. ' I feel the flowers growing over me,' 
 he murmured once, when very near to death, and 
 the saying is full of the woodland spirit that breathes 
 through all his verse. Nor need we mourn too 
 much. He is at home with the King in his beauty, 
 in that land which is not so very far off as the 
 prophet thought it then. 
 
 On his grave the words he chose himself are 
 carved, * Here lies one whose name was writ in 
 water.' The water flows in all our hearts ; and in 
 the meadows within, where we walk when we are 
 alone, there are a thousand flowers, born and 
 nourished by his sweet and songful streams. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press 
 

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