ruling, all the evil-"madness, crime, remorse, hell, or the sharp fear of hell." Scene 3, Act ii., shows the nature-worship fading away. But the most prominent and pervading idea of the poem is Pantheistic. The Good spirit, which at last triumphs, is, indeed, typified in the Titan Prometheus, and not in a man; but no faith in or worship of this deliverer is required from men who would be saved. The Universal Mind is freed and purified; the earth and the moon grow more glorious, and fertile, and beautiful, inspired by the renewed health of the informing spirit. The poem is an apotheosis of the One Infinite Soul, selfsubsisting, informing all things, one and the same in all masks of man, and beast, and worm, and plant, and slime. The conclusion of the "Sensitive Plant," written in 1820, puts forth somewhat hesitatingly a species of transcendental idealism, which there is no space here for considering.

We now come to the poems written in 1821, the year before his death.

"Hellas" (in the wonderful chorus commencing, "Worlds on worlds are rolling ever, from creation to decay") contains a noble recognition of the character of Jesus Christ, a recognition much more decided than that in the First Act of the Prometheus. It also contains, in the speeches of Ahasuerus to Mahmud, one of the two grandest assertions of Idealism with which I am acquainted; the other is developed in his "Ode to Heaven," written in 1819. It is pure Berkeleyan philosophy, with the Kantian extension -that space and time are merely necessary forms of human thought, and have no existence separate from the human mind. Having no room for these passages

in extenso, I refrain from injuring them by fragmentary citation.

From the "Adonais," I must quote a little, in order to show what Pantheism pervades it. He asserts of the dead Keats :

"He is a portion of the loveliness

Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear

His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress

Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there

All new successions to the forms they wear;

Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight

To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;

And bursting, in its beauty and its might,

From trees, and beasts, and men, into the Heaven's light."

And, again :

"The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light for ever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments.-Die

If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!"

And, finally :

"That Light, whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty, in which all things work and move,
That Benediction, which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love,
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man, and beast, and earth, and air, and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality."

Such doctrine as is expressed and implied in these lines differs little from what is called pure Theism.

It simply dwells so continually on the Infinity of God as to overlook, or slightly regard His Personality: it is Spiritualism and Theism, but of the Greeks rather than the Hebrews. The fact is that Shelley, like every other brave Recusant, is credited with much more infidelity than he really had. Finding a vast State Church, based upon politico-theology, everywhere in the ascendant, he was naturally more occupied in negativing dominant assumptions than in affirming his own positive convictions. If a man asserts his right to crush me under his feet, it is not probable that my reply will contain an exact recognition of whatever wisdom and goodness he may really have.

So much for formulas: but, of course, we are agreed that Shelley's real religious character consisted in his unquenchable love and reverence for all holiness, truth, and beauty. He believed so much more than the generality of us, he strove with so unusual an ardour to realise his belief in his life, that he is necessarily accounted an infidel and semi-maniac by the great majority.

"I never knew that time in England, when men of truest religion were not counted sectaries. . . . Certainly, if ignorance and perverseness will needs be national and universal, then they who adhere to wisdom and to truth are not therefore to be blamed for being so few as to seem a sect or faction." Which are two sentences of (John Milton's) "Eikonoklastes." -Your sincere Friend,

B. V.

NOTICE OF "THE LIFE OF SHELLEY"

BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

("English Men of Letters" Series)

We have departed from the order in which we at first intended to notice these books,* having held back Scott that he might follow Burns, and Shelley that he might follow Spenser. The author of the "Prometheus Unbound," like the author of the "Faërie Queene," has been acclaimed the poet of poets. Spenser was immediately accepted and rated at his true worth by all the noblest of his time, whose memories live amongst the noblest of all time. Shelley was despised and rejected by his own generation and even by that which followed it, but his cyclic day was bound to come, and rapid and splendid has been its development since the first faint flush of its dawning. Men and women who in their youth, thirty, or perhaps even twenty years past, cherished a lonely enthusiasm for him-lonely so far as converse and reading could make them aware, though, doubtless, there are always seven thousand in Israel who have never bowed the knee to the dominant Baal-discover not without astonish

* This review formed one of a number of notices of the various works included in the "English Men of Letters" Series.

ment that he whom they worshipped in secret is no longer execrated or contemned by their people, but is actually advanced to a lofty place in the national Pantheon, that it is no longer a distinction good or bad to burn incense at his shrine.

The simple facts that he has been chosen as one of the earliest subjects in a series whose avowed chief end is popularity, and that already, as we write, the Monograph on him is advertised as in its sixth thousand, prove how enormously he has risen in public interest and estimation during this second half of our century. We have ample corroboration of this in the two critical editions of his poems, with elaborate memoir, by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, in that of Mr. H. B. Forman, in the cheap reprint of "Poems and Prose Works" by Mr. R. H. Shepherd, in the various recent popular editions and selections of his poems; in the numerous articles on him, biographical and critical, among which we may specify those by Mr. R. Garnett, the late T. L. Peacock (to whom so many of Shelley's best letters from Italy were addressed), Miss Mathilde Blind, Prof. T. Spencer Bayne, and Mr. Swinburne; and in such works as Trelawny's "Records" (the new enlarged edition of the "Recollections"), Robert Browning's introduction to the Pseudo-Letters (and his superb Memorabilia, in "Men and Women "), Mr. Garnett's "Relics, Lady Shelley's "Memorials," and the late Mr. D. F. M'Carthy's "Early Life."

Yet, notwithstanding all the Shelley literature thus glanced at, a clear place was left, and a distinct need existed, for such a popular booklet as the present, treating comprehensively, though succinctly, the life