ing powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave."

Our readers will not expect, from this somewhat dim enunciation, at all times to see the drift of this wild poem; but we think they will feel, notwithstanding, that there is the light of poetry even in the darkness of Mr Shelley's imagination. Alastor is thus first introduced to our notice.

By solemn vision, and bright silver dream, His infancy was nurtured. Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient

air,

Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.
The fountains of divine philosophy
Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great,
Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past
In truth or fable consecrates, he felt
And knew. When early youth had past, he
left

His cold fireside and alienated home
To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.
Many a wide waste and tangled wildnerness
Has lured his fearless steps: and he has bought
With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage

men,

His rest and food. Nature's most secret steps He like her shadow has pursued.

He is then described as visiting volcanoes, lakes of bitumen, caves winding among the springs of fire, and starry domes of diamond and gold, supported by crystal columns, and adorned with shrines of pearl and thrones of chrysolite-a magnificent pilgrimage no doubt, and not the less so on account of its being rather unintelligible. On completing his mineralogical and geological observations, and on re-ascending from the interior of our earth into the upper regions, his route is, to our taste, much more interesting and worthy of a poet.

His wandering step Obedient to high thoughts, has visited The awful ruins of the days of old : Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids, Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange Sculptured on alabaster obelisk, Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphynx, Dark Ethiopia in her desert hills Conceals. Among the ruined temples there, Stupendous columns, and wild images Of more than man, where marble dæmons watch

The Zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men

shades

Suspended he that task, but ever gazed And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.

During the soul-rapt enthusiasm of these mystic and magnificent wanderings, Alastor has no time to fall in love; but we are given to understand that, wherever he roams, he inspires it. There is much beauty in this picture.

Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food,

Her daily portion, from her father's tent, And spread her matting for his couch, and stole

From duties and repose to tend his steps
Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe
To speak her love :-and watched his night-
ly sleep,

Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips
Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath
Of innocent dreams arose: then, when red

morn

Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned.

This poor Arabian maid has no power to detain him, and

And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,
The poet wandering on, through Arabie
And o'er the aerial mountains which pour
down

Indus and Oxus from their icy caves,
In joy and exultation held his way.

At last, as he lies asleep in the loneliest and loveliest dell in the Vale of Cashmire, a vision comes upon him, bringing with it a dream of hopes never felt before.

He dreamed a veiled maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought; its music long, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held

His inmost sense suspended in its web
Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues.
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her
theme,

And lofty hopes of divine liberty,
Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy,
Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood
Of her pure mind kindled through all her
frame

A permeating fire: wild numbers then
She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous
sobs

Subdued by its own pathos: her fair hand

Till vast Aornos seen from Petra's steep Hung o'er the low horizon like a cloud; Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on; Day after day, a weary waste of hours, Bearing within his life the brooding care That ever fed on its decaying flame.

At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore He paused, a wide and melancholy waste Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there, Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds. It rose as he approached, and with strong wings

Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course
High over the immeasurable main.
His eyes pursued its flight." Thou hast a
home,

Beautiful bird; thou voyagest to thine home,
Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy

neck

With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy. And what am I that I should linger here, With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned

To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven That echoes not my thoughts ?"

Just as he finishes his exclamation, he sees a little shallop floating near the shore, and a restless impulse urges him to embark,

And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's

flowers

For ever gaze on their own drooping eyes, Reflected in the crystal calm. The wave Of the boat's motion marred their pensive task,

Which nought but vagrant bird, or wanton wind,

Or falling spear-grass, or their own decay
Had e'er disturbed before.

Here some mysterious influences seem breathed from the spirit of nature over Alastor's soul, and its agitation to sink into a sort of melancholy calm. The following description, though rather too much laboured, in the unsatisfied prodigality of opulent youth, is, beyond doubt, most highly poetical.

Scooped in the dark base of their aery rocks
Mocking its moans, respond and roar for ever.
The meeting boughs and implicated leaves
Wove twilight o'er the Poet's path, as led
By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death,
He sought in Nature's dearest haunt, some
bank,

Her cradle, and his sepulchre. More dark
And dark the shades accumulate. The oak,
Expanding its immense and knotty arms,
Embraces the light beech. The pyramids
Of the tall cedar overarching, frame
Most solemn domes within, and far below,
Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,
The ash and the acacia floating hang
Tremulous and pale. Like restless ser-
pents, clothed

In rainbow and in fire, the parasites,
Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow
around

The gray trunks, and, as gamesome infants' eyes,

With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles,

Fold their beams round the hearts of those

that love,

These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs

Make net-work of the dark blue light of day, Uniting their close union; the woven leaves And the night's noontide clearness, mutable As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy

lawns

Soon as his feet fall on the threshold of this green recess, the wanderer 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, even 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 Diffused and motionless on the smooth brink Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest, Of that obscurest chasm ;-and thus he lay, Surrendering to their final impulses The hovering powers of life. despair,

Hope and

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:-his 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.

The pale, the cold, and the moony smile Which the meteor beam of a starless night Sheds on a lonely and sea-girt isle,

Ere the dawning of morn's undoubted
light,

Is the flame of life so fickle and wan
That flits round our steps till their strength

is gone.

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 tale 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!

Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be With the fears and the love for that which we see?

There breathes over the following scene, a spirit of deep, solemn, and mournful repose.

A SUMMER-EVENING CHURCH-YARD, Lechlade, Gloucestershire.

The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere

Each vapour that obscured the sunset's ray; And pallid evening twines its beaming hair In duskier braids around the languid eyes of day:

Silence and twilight, unbeloved of men, Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.

They breathe their spells towards depart

ing day,

Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea ; Light, sound, and motion own the potent

sway,

Responding to the charm with its own mys

tery.

The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass

Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.

Thou too, aerial Pile! whose pinnacles Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire, Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells, Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and dis

tant spire,

Around whose lessening and invisible height Gather among the stars the clouds of night.

The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres : And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound

Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,

Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,

And mingling with the still night and mute sky

Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.

Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild

And terrorless as this serenest night: Here could I hope, like some enquiring child

Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight

Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.

Long as our extracts have been, we must find room for one more, 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 ?—
Spare aught but a dark theme,
On which the lightest heart might moralize?
Or is it but that downy-winged slumbers
Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near
her lids

To watch their own repose?
Will they, when morning's beam
Flows through those wells of light,
Seek far from noise and day some western

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 shew himself a man of such lofty principles as to entitle him to ride the high horse in comVOL. VI.

pany with the author of the Revolt of İslam. 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 Shelly'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 shews 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 shews 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

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