differing moods, account for this quality. He did not try experiments with his muse, but imposed upon her a consistent character.

For his style, the best description is that of R. H. Hutton: "The most characteristic earlier and the most characteristic later style are alike in the limpid coolness of their effect, the effect in the earlier style of bubbling water, in the later of morning dew." There is a buoyancy of restrained passion in some of his best known poems, and a chaste contemplativeness in part of his later work that soothes and calms the troubled spirit. This may be said of his good work. On the cumbrous heaviness of his preaching vein, when the sense of his mission got the better of his genuine emotions, it is needless to enlarge.

Coleridge was as unlike his friend as possible. With a much more deeply philosophical mind, with an infinitely greater power to suffer, and hence to echo the feelings of toiling, wronged humanity, with a sense of the unsubstantial, mysterious world hovering about us, and an imagination capable of portraying pictures which lie beyond reality, he tried various forms of expression, seemed to surpass in several, and then, before he had chosen the medium which best suited him, lost his hold upon himself and upon his creative power.

If he had found his theme, it would perhaps have been the relation of man to God and to mankind. As it is, his best poems vibrate with human emotion. There is a personal cry in them all; more than most poems they need to be read with the commentary of his daily life fresh in the mind. "The Ancient Mariner" is a masterpiece in

the domain of romance, but at the end of its vivid imagery comes the little sermon, " He prayeth best who loveth best," as if Coleridge had suddenly forgotten his characters, and was speaking for himself. In "Christabel," also, there seems to be an undercurrent of feeling that pure, prayerful love will suffice to conquer the wiles of evil. As his mind was always seeking for psychological truth, so his heart yearned for affection. One might almost say that, like Shelley, he was in love with love; only that, unlike Shelley, his passion was not for transcendental, ideal love, but for plain, comforting, human love, and trust in God. In the poems which mention Sara and Little Hartley, Lamb and Wordsworth, there is always this tender love. In the “Ode on the Departing Year," the subject is the violation of the love of man to man, nation to nation.

With this simple faith in the power of love, with his far-reaching imagination and his eager inquiry into philosophic truth, he might in time have solved for us some of the problems of life, as Wordsworth has developed the teaching of nature, but he was a wrecked man before the time came. From his boyhood he had been subject to violent attacks of neuralgia, and he had not the resolute will necessary to endure pain. As early as 1792 he was familiar with the use of ether; by 1803 he was the prey of opium. It sapped his manhood, and wrung from him over and over again tears of blood, for he knew that without help he had not strength to free himself from his tormentor. In 1816, after years of fitful, homeless wandering, he put himself under the care of Mr. Gillman to be shielded from temptation.

His light of poetry was indeed gone out. Happy for

him that he could still recover his intellectual sway. In his later days he drew about him eager young men ready for the impress of high thoughts, and he lived to prove that always he was "one who loved the light and grew toward it."

Shelley was twenty years younger than Coleridge and grew to manhood when the influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge was already part of the literary environment. He came from a family of honorable antiquity, though apparently of no literary or special intellectual gifts. His father was a kindly, worldly, somewhat irascible gentleman of no imagination; his mother is described as beautiful and sensible.

The son Shelley would have been an ugly duckling in any family. Tall and slender, with an exceedingly small face and an abundance of wavy brown hair which he wore long in an age when fashion cropped the hair; so awkward that in later years he would upset the footman's gravity by tumbling over himself as he went upstairs, yet so agile that, as he walked through the streets of London, intent on a book, he would slip out of the press with unconscious ease when anyone in the crowd tried to jostle him; with a voice of singular depth and sweetness when reading calmly, but rising to a discordant screech if he was excited or incensed, he spent his life in a perpetual warfare between the deep love he bore mankind, and the hatred of the world which was outraged by his way of promulgating that love. If ever there was a boy who did not belong to the respectable, unimaginative,

world-fearing—rather than God-fearing-family into which he was born, it was Shelley.

By the time he went to Oxford he was proud of the name of "Atheist," by which he meant that he did not believe in historical Christianity. In later years he had a profound reverence for the founder of Christianity, and a firm belief in the loving power which he conceived as ruling in the Universe; but he always felt a deep abhorrence for established orthodoxy.

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In those days such sentiments were sufficiently startling; when they were accompanied by other beliefs which would destroy the morality as well as the religion of society, it is not surprising that he was branded as a demon. He was a disciple of William Godwin, whose Inquiry concerning Political Justice" had given voice to some of the wildest ideas engendered by the French Revolution. Shelley honestly believed that marriage is wrong, and though he was twice married, he submitted against his own judgment to the prejudices of society. According to his standard, true love is the only force which should bind; if true love ceases the bond should be broken; if it holds there is no need of the marriage ceremony.

No wonder society stood aghast. Strangers could not know his deep love for his fellow-beings; his fixed belief that mankind left to itself is pure and good, and that sham government and sham religion have debased the world; his intense yearning for that perfect harmony between God and man and the universe which constitutes the true music of the spheres.

The hostility of the world had its effect on Shelley's poetry. When his father refused to receive him at Field

Place, when the cousin whom he loved drew away from him, when afterward all the world cried shame, and the Lord Chancellor refused him the custody of his own children, it is not strange that he was thrown back upon himself, or that his mood fluctuated between devotion to the cause of mankind and absorption in his own intellectual aspirations and personal affinities. His greatest work, "Prometheus Unbound," combines both elements; it is the poem of the conquest of the lover of mankind over the oppressor of mankind, cast in the highly spiritualized form which was congenial to himself. Most of his poems, however, show either one phase or the other of his genius; in his lyrics he forgets mankind to express his own illimitable thirst for ever-unattainable beauty, the beauty which is truth.

His "lyrical cry" is unlike the note of any other lyric poet. It has been said that he sings not what he feels, but what he wishes to feel, what is almost within his grasp, but always eluding him. He yearns with passionate intensity for intellectual beauty, but the passion is not of this world; his desires like his images are highly sublimated forms, always ideal beauty, ideal expression.

Though his mind in its reaching out did not understand all the mysteries which thrilled his being, at least he came near to a spiritual perception of nature and divinity, and his very song uplifts us. As a mere matter of harmonious melody the poem sings itself into our brains. If his words meant nothing we should still feel their charm. With him, however, the song is a subtle interweaving of thought with emotion. He has given expression to that bitter-sweet, half-comprehended longing for the unknown which pervades a large portion of society