A History of English Literature

A rather long passage of appreciative criticism [Footnote: Professor A.C.
Bradley, 'Oxford Lectures on Poetry' (Macmillan), p.196.] is sufficiently
suggestive for quotation:
"From the world of [Shelley's] imagination the shapes of the old world had
disappeared, and their place was taken by a stream of radiant vapors,
incessantly forming, shifting, and dissolving in the 'clear golden dawn,'
and hymning with the voices of seraphs, to the music of the stars and the
'singing rain,' the sublime ridiculous theories of Godwin. In his heart
were emotions that responded to the vision--an aspiration or ecstasy, a
dejection or despair, like those of spirits rapt into Paradise or mourning
over its ruin. And he wrote not like Shakspere or Pope, for Londoners
sitting in a theatre or a coffee-house, intelligence's vivid enough but
definitely embodied in a definite society, able to fly, but also able to
sit; he wrote, or rather he sang, to his own soul, to other spirit-sparks
of the fire of Liberty scattered over the dark earth, to spirits in the
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
wildernesses; the 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty'; 'Julian and Maddalo,' in
which Shelley and Byron (Maddalo) are portrayed; and 'Epipsychidion,' an
ecstatic poem on the love which is spiritual sympathy. Shelley's satires
may be disregarded. To the dramatic form belong his two most important long
poems. 'Prometheus Unbound' partly follows AEschylus in treating the
torture of the Titan who is the champion or personification of Mankind, by
Zeus, whom Shelley makes the incarnation of tyranny and on whose overthrow
the Golden Age of Shelleyan anarchy succeeds. The poem is a lyrical drama,
more on the Greek than on the English model. There is almost no action, and
the significance lies first in the lyrical beauty of the profuse choruses
and second in the complete embodiment of Shelley's passionate hatred of
tyranny. 'The Cenci' is more dramatic in form, though the excess of speech