equal, is not easy to follow and has little reality. It is neither a plain tale convincingly told like Julian and Maddalo, nor a symbolic myth like Prometheus Unbound. Its command of verse and wealth of imagery make it impossible to say that the poet is feeling his way. Shelley never felt his way. He made his swift flights and fell below his goal. Then he gathered his strength together for another flight.

The Revolt of Islam goes far beyond Godwin in making its hero and heroine suffer martyrdom. And it no longer represents evil as external to man's nature. Good and evil are in conflict, as symbolized by the struggle of the eagle and the snake. Shelley still believed that man by his own will could eradicate evil. But he had learned that the world is not to be so easily reformed as he had imagined. And he had begun to question his own perfection. He had begun to wonder how far his conduct and op ̊nions had rendered ineffective his zeal for interesting and improving mankind.

In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley again attempted the im ossible; but this time he succeeded. To compose a drama which should be sustained on the heights of lyrical ecstasy is, by all precedent, impossible. And judged by the laws of a drama of action, the Prometheus of course fails. But it is not a drama of action. It is a myth in which the poet's dream of the regeneration of mankind is represented as accomplished in one fated hour, to symbolize what is conceived of as happening in the long process of the ages. The fall of Jupiter is the fall of orthodox Christianity with its train of evils, and the triumph of Prometheus is the triumph of the true spirit of Christ. Prometheus, who represents humanity, has suffered and endured until he is able to forgive his greatest enemy. Then is Love triumphant through the worlds, and the emanations of the mind, together with the earth and the moon and all living creatures, rejoice in the bliss of freedom. Man has become the king over himself, just, gentle, wise, not passionless but free from guilt or pain, only not free from death and mutability, without which he might

oversoar

The loftiest star of unascended heaven
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.

Nothing in such a dream is to be taken literally. Shelley did not aspire to live in an intense inane; he exalts neither wanton license nor passionless perfection. Every idealist who has grasped in imagination a world made perfect by love, and by a love that shall control even the forces of nature in the service of humanity, has pictured something unreal to those of us who are 'chained to Time".

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In the Prometheus, the poet's power of imagination, his sense of a pervading spirit of life, his passion for perfection, have united to create an elemental world. Its creatures are more than abstractions. They are suffering, thinking, exulting beings, sublimated and etherialized-the elements rather than the forms of actual life. It is a poem which the imagination of the Greeks would have grasped more easily than does ours. The Hellenist in Shelley has triumphed over the reformer and the romanticist. Unless one understands Shelley's fundamental thought and purpose one misses the beauty of the most exalted lyrics in the Prometheus, even of the most beautiful of all:

Life of life, thy lips enkindle

With their love the breath between them.

If there seems to be too much regard for the bliss of lovers in this ideal world, that is because Shelley was always trying to spiritualize what seemed to him the highest impulses of human nature and to seek for the ultimate unity of love and beauty and goodness. And we are constantly brought back to the pre-occupations of his heroic conscience:

To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs darker than death and night;

To defy power which seems omnipotent;

To love and bear; to hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

Neither to change nor falter nor repent.

In the last year of his life, when he wrote his other lyrical drama, Hellas, at the news of the uprising in Greece, Shelley had become more interested in partial realizations of his hopes. He had more than once praised the United States of America as one of them. Now he is more anxious that England shall go to the aid

of Greece than that she shall disband her standing army in order to destroy at a stroke, as he once advocated, the horrors of war. While he still holds to his ideal, he has gone far from the easy solution of things in Queen Mab. In Hellas, as in Adonais, he rests his hope in the eternity of thought. Still raising the standard of freedom, his song again ranges through the past, the present and the future, but with such a different power that one must count Queen Mab and The Revolt of Islam as mere juvenilia in comparison.

Worlds on worlds are ever rolling

From creation to decay,

Like the bubbles on a river

Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

But they are still immortal

Who, through birth's orient portal

And death's dark chasm hurrying to and fro,
Clothe their unceasing flight

In the brief dust and light

Gathered around their chariots as they go.

Now the Prometheus of suffering humanity is Christ, though he does not bring a millennium. Destruction follows the Cross, while

Our hills and streams
Dispeopled of their dreams
Wail for the golden years;

yet the spirit of both Christ and Socrates shall return and Athens shall be reborn.

The world's great age begins anew

The golden years return,

not literally but in the realm of thought.

If Greece must be

A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble
And build themselves impregnably

In a diviner clime,

To Amphionic music, on some cape sublime
That frowns above the idle foam of time.

These are the poems which most truly represent Shelley's genius, although his personal lyrics let us into his more emotional

moods. Half way between them are the two dirges for poets, Alastor and Adonais.

Alastor is the earliest of his poems in which the true Shelley soars and sings; Adonais, written near the end of his life, has been called with some justice his masterpiece. To compare one with the other is to perceive how his hold upon reality grew with experience and the practice of his art. Alastor is the outcry of a spirit against the limitations of life. It is the idealized story of one who was born to pursue a dream and clasp a shadow, yet to whom "it seemed better to die obedient to the light within him than to live the life of those who are morally dead"; and between these extremes Shelley saw no compromise. In the Adonais this intense striving and despair have given place to a mood of calm exaltation. It celebrates the death of Keats, but it goes far beyond any concrete subject to dwell upon the mysteries of life and death. Abstract thoughts are clothed in living images, images are woven together in a sustained harmony that rises higher and higher as the poet's bark is driven farther from the shore of reality and sails fearlessly on the wings of faith into the unknown. Metaphysical speculation has given place to religion -the religion that bows reverently before the unknowable and accepts with faith the union of the soul with the Eternal. It is no swift flight of lyric ecstasy; it is the swelling of strain after strain of solemn music, each one more charged than the last with "immortal longings", until the benediction of sustaining Love descends in the great climax.

Shelley's genius expressed itself in so many different forms that to give any account of his poems in their relation to his life and character is a large task. If you attempt to put even his short lyrics into categories you hear Shelley saying, in one of his swift images,

Bright reason will mock thee

Like the sun from a wintry sky.

His personal lyrics are songs of joy and despair, of triumph and defeat; but they are lifted above the pain that often drags upon the poet's spirit by the beauty of their music. Different as they are, impossible as it is to catch them and chain them with epithets, they are the expression of one who, "born to desire more

than any understand," was yet able "to hope till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates".

We have been told within a few months by the editors of two leading English reviews that our greatest need at the present time is a poetical interpretation of life, a poetical interpretation of religion; that we have exaggerated the importance of government on the one hand and of dogma on the other; that the historical interpretation of religion must give way to a belief in the spirit of Christ in its lasting, its poetical significance; and that in that alone lies our hope of an enlightened democracy.

Would these men look for guidance to a poet who defied both Church and State, who was a disobedient son, an insubordinate student, a breaker of the marriage vow, an advocate of free love and a vegetarian diet,—one who soared aloft on dreams of man made perfect and disregarded the restraints mankind has placed about his known weaknesses, a visionary poet with his head among the stars and his feet stumbling along the rocky paths of earth? One who could call himself

A pard-like spirit beautiful and swift,

and yet cry out, "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!"-what light can such a poet have for an age like ours?-one moreover who delights in abstract ideas and etherialized emotions, piling his images one upon another till the mind pants in pursuing them? Yet where shall one look for a more exalted hope or a more sincere expression of the religion that is poetically divined?

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

Shelley does not paint all the colors of that fragile dome. We shall not look to him for life in action, but for life in thought and feeling; for refinements of thought and feeling, but the refinements not of a mind overshadowed by a degenerate world-weariness, but of an intellect that retained the unworldly simplicity of a free and open nature-"one of the few persons who can literally be said to love their kind."

Shelley combines a mystic's faith with the humanitarian in