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To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell,
Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep
Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades,
Like vaporous shapes half seen."

He now feels the dark approaching consciousness of deathand we think the following address to a stream, on whose banks the youth is lying, contains a wild, and solemn, and mysterious foreboding of dissolution.

"O stream!

Whose source is inaccessibly profound,
Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?
Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness,
Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulfs,
Thy searchless fountain, and invisible course
Have each their type in me; and the wide sky,
And measureless ocean may declare as soon
What oozy cavern or what wandering cloud
Contains thy waters, as the universe

Tell where these living thoughts reside, when stretched
Upon thy flowers my bloodless limbs shall waste

I' the passing wind!"

The beauty of the woods seems now to decay, and there is a gradual, but ghastly change all around, which is described by a very fine image.

"For, as fast years flow away,

The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin
And white, and where irradiate dewy eyes
Had shone, gleam stony orbs :-so from his steps
Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade
Of the green groves, with all their odorous winds
And musical motions."

The stream, on whose banks he strays, leads him into a dreadful land, where all is wrapped in the dimness and thunder of fear; but the pilgrim's dreary travel ends in peace; and on entering the threshold of the green recess, he feels that his last hour is come. There is scarcely any part of the poem, which does not partake of a character of extravagance-and probably many of our readers may have felt this to be the case in our extracts, more than ourselves. Be this as it may, we cannot but think that there is great sublimity in the death scene.

"He did place
His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk
Of the old pine. Upon an ivied stone
Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest,
Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink
Of that obscurest chasm ;-and thus he lay,
Surrendering to their final impulses

The hovering powers of life. Hope and despair,
The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear
Marred his repose; the influxes of sense,
And his own being unalloyed by pain,
Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed

The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there

At peace, and faintly smiling:-bis last sight
Was the great moon, which o'er the western line
Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended,
With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed
To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills
It rests, and still as the divided frame
Of the vast meteor sunk, the Poet's blood,
That ever beat in mystic sympathy

With nature's ebb and flow, grew feebler still:
And when two lessening points of light alone
Gleamed thro' the darkness, the alternate gasp
Of his faint respiration scarce did stir
The stagnate night :-till the minutest ray

Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart.
It paused-it fluttered. But when heaven remained
Utterly black, the murky shades involved

An image, silent, cold, and motionless,

As their own voiceless earth and vacant air.
Even as a vapour fed with golden beams
That ministered on sunlight, ere the west
Eclipses it, was now that wonderous frame-
No sense, no motion, no divinity-

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."

Several of the smaller poems contain beauties of no ordinary kind-but they are almost all liable to the charge of vagueness and obscurity. Mr. Shelley's imagination is enamoured of dreams of death; and he loves to strike his harp among the tombs.

There is no Work, nor Device, nor Knowledge, nor Wisdom in the Grave, whither thou goest. Ecclesiastes.

"O man! hold thee on in courage of soul

Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way,
And the billows of cloud that around thee roll
Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day,
Where hell and heaven shall leave thee free
To the universe of destiny.

This world is the nurse of all we know,

This world is the mother of all we feel,

And the coming of death is a fearful blow

To a brain unencompassed with nerves of steel;
When all that we know, or feel, or see,

Shall pass like an unreal mystery.

The secret things of the grave are there,

Where all but this frame must surely be,

Though the fine-wrought eye and the wondrous ear
No longer will live to hear or to see

All that is great and all that is strange
In the boundless realm of unending change.
Who telleth a lie of unspeaking death?
Who lifteth the veil of what is to come?

Who painteth the shadows that are beneath
The wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb?

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Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be

With the fears and the love for that which we see?"

We will make one more extract, from a strange and unintelligible fragment of a poem, entitled "The Dæmon of the World." It is exceedingly beautiful.

"How wonderful is Death,

Death and his brother Sleep!

One pale as yonder wan and horned moon,
With lips of lurid blue,

The other glowing like the vital morn,
When throned on ocean's wave

It breathes over the world:

Yet both so passing strange and wonderful!
Hath then the iron-sceptered Skeleton,
Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres,
To the hell dogs that couch beneath his throne
Cast that fair prey? Must that divinest form,
Which love and admiration cannot view
Without a beating heart, whose azure veins
Steal like dark streams along a field of snow,
Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed
In light of some sublimest mind, decay?
Nor putrefaction's breath

Leave aught of this pure spectacle

But loathsomeness and ruin ?—"

"Or is it but that downy-winged slumbers

Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near her lids
To watch their own repose ?"

"Ianthe doth not sleep

The dreamless sleep of death:

Nor in her moonlight chamber silently

Doth Henry hear her regular pulses throb,

Or mark her delicate cheek

With interchange of hues mock the broad moon
Outwatching weary night,

Without assured reward.

Her dewy eyes are closed;

On their translucent lids, whose texture fine

Scarce hides the dark blue orbs that burn below

With unapparent fire,

The baby Sleep is pillowed:

Her golden tresses shade

The bosom's stainless pride,

Twining like tendrils of the parasite

Around a marble column."

We beg leave, in conclusion, to say a few words about the treatment which Mr. Shelley has, in his poetical character, received from the public. By our periodical critics, he has either been entirely overlooked, or slightingly noticed, or grossly abused. There is not so much to find fault with in the mere silence of critics; but we do not hesitate to say, with all due respect for the general character of that journal, that Mr. Shelley has been infamously and stupidly treated in the Quarterly Review. His Reviewer there,

whoever he is, does not show himself a man of such lofty principles as to entitle him to ride the high horse in company with the author of the Revolt of Islam. And when one compares the vis inertia of his motionless prose, with the "eagle-winged raptures" of Mr. Shelley's poetry, one does not think, indeed, of Satan reproving Sin, but one does think, we will say it in plain words, and without a figure, of a dunce rating a man of genius. If that critic does not know that Mr. Shelley is a poet, almost in the very highest sense of that mysterious word, then, we appeal to all those whom we have enabled to judge for themselves, if he be not unfit to speak of poetry before the people of England. If he does know that Mr. Shelley is a great poet, what manner of man is he, who, with such conviction, brings himself, with the utmost difficulty, to admit that there is any beauty at all in Mr. Shelley's writings, and is happy to pass that admission off with an accidental and niggardly phrase of vague and valueless commendation. This is manifest and mean-glaring and gross injustice on the part of a man who comes forward as the champion of morality, truth, faith, and religion. This is being guilty of one of the very worst charges of which he accuses another; nor will any man who loves and honours genius, even though that genius may have occasionally suffered itself to be both stained and led astray, think but with contempt, and indignation, and scorn, of a critic, who, while he pretends to wield the weapons of honour, virtue, and truth, yet clothes himself in the armour of deceit, hypocrisy, and falsehood. He exults to calumniate Mr. Shelley's moral character, but he fears to acknowledge his genius. And therefore do we, as the sincere, though sometimes sorrowing friends of Mr. Shelley, scruple not to say, even though it may expose us to the charge of personality from those from whom alone such a charge could at all affect our minds, that the critic shows himself by such conduct, as far inferior to Mr. Shelley as a man of worth, as the language in which he utters his falsehood and uncharitableness, shows him to be inferior as a man of intellect.

In the present state of public feeling, with regard to poets and poetry, a critic cannot attempt to defraud a poet of his fame, without paying the penalty either of his ignorance or his injustice. So long as he confines the expression of his envy or stupidity to works of moderate or doubtful merit, he may escape punishment; but if he dare to insult the spirit of England by contumelious and scornful treatment of any one of her gifted sons, that contumely and that scorn will most certainly be flung back upon himself, till he be made to shrink and to shiver beneath the load. It is not in the power of all the critics alive, to blind one true lover of poetry to the splendour of Mr. Shelley's genius-and the reader who, from nere curiosity, should turn to the Revolt of Islam to see what sort

of trash it was that so moved the wrath, and the spleen, and the scorn of the Reviewer, would soon feel, that to understand the greatness of the poet, and the littleness of his traducer, nothing more was necessary than to recite to his delighted sense, any six successive stanzas of that poem, so full of music, imagination, intellect, and passion. We care comparatively little for injustice of fered to one moving majestical in the broad day of fame: it is the injustice done to the great while their greatness is unknown or misunderstood, that a generous nature most abhors, inasmuch as it seems more basely wicked to wish that genius might never lift its head, than to envy the glory with which it is encircled.

There is, we firmly believe, a strong love of genius in the people of this country, and they are willing to pardon to its possessor much extravagance and error-nay, even more serious transgressions. Let both Mr. Shelley and his critic think of that-let it encourage the one to walk onwards to his bright destiny, without turning into dark, or doubtful, or wicked ways-let it teach the other to feel a proper sense of his own insignificance, and to be ashamed, in the midst of his own weaknesses, and deficiencies, and meannesses, to aggravate the faults of the highly-gifted, and to gloat with a sinful satisfaction on the real or imaginary debasement of genius and intellect.

And here we ought, perhaps, to stop. But the Reviewer has dealt out a number of dark and oracular denunciations against the Poet, which the public can know nothing about, except that they imply a charge of immorality and wickedness. Let him speak out plainly, or let him hold his tongue. There are many wicked and foolish things in Mr. Shelley's creed, and we have not hitherto scrupled, nor shall we henceforth scruple to expose that wickedness and that folly. But we do not think that he believes his own creed-at least, that he believes it fully and to utter convictionand we doubt not but the scales will yet all fall from his eyes. The Reviewer, however, with a face of most laughable horror, accuses Mr. Shelley in the same breath, of some nameless act of atrocity, and of having been rusticated, or expelled, or warned to go away from the University of Oxford! He seems to shudder with the same holy fear at the violation of the laws of morality, and the breaking of college rules. He forgets that in the world men do not wear caps and gowns as at Oriel or Exeter. He preaches not like Paul-but like a Proctor.

Once more, then, we bid Mr. Shelley farewell. Let him come forth from the eternal city-where, we understand he has been sojourning-in his strength, conquering and to conquer. Let his soul watch his soul, and listen to the voice of its own noble nature-and there is no doubt that the future will make amends for the past,

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