air, to the boundless spirit of Nature or Freedom or Love, his one place of
rest and the one source of his vision, ecstasy, and sorrow. He sang
_to_ this, and he sang _of_ it, and of the emotions it inspired,
and of its world-wide contest with such shapes of darkness as Faith and
Custom. And he made immortal music; now in melodies as exquisite and varied
as the songs of Schubert, and now in symphonies where the crudest of
Philosophies of History melted into golden harmony. For although there was
something always working in Shelley's mind and issuing in those radiant
vapors, he was far deeper and truer than his philosophic creed; its
expression and even its development were constantly checked or distorted by
the hard and narrow framework of his creed. And it was one which in effect
condemned nine-tenths of the human nature that has formed the material of
the world's great poems." [Footnote: Perhaps the finest piece of
rhapsodical appreciative criticism written in later years is the essay on
Shelley (especially the last half) by Francis Thompson (Scribner).]

The finest of Shelley's poems, are his lyrics. 'The Skylark' and 'The
Cloud' are among the most dazzling and unique of all outbursts of poetic
genius. Of the 'Ode to the West Wind,' a succession of surging emotions and
visions of beauty swept, as if by the wind itself, through the vast spaces
of the world, Swinburne exclaims: 'It is beyond and outside and above all
criticism, all praise, and all thanksgiving.' The 'Lines Written among the
Euganean Hills,' 'The Indian Serenade,' 'The Sensitive Plant' (a brief
narrative), and not a few others are also of the highest quality. In
'Adonais,' an elegy on Keats and an invective against the reviewer whose
brutal criticism, as Shelley wrongly supposed, had helped to kill him,
splendid poetic power, at least, must be admitted. Much less satisfactory
but still fascinating are the longer poems, narrative or philosophical,
such as the early 'Alastor,' a vague allegory of a poet's quest for the
beautiful through a gorgeous and incoherent succession of romantic