From Chaucer to Tennyson

Parted_, the _Elegy on Thyrza_, _Stanzas to Augusta_, _She Walks in Beauty_, and of innumerable passages, lyrical and descriptive, in his longer poems. He had not the wisdom of Wordsworth, nor the rich and subtle imagination of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats when they were at their best. But he had greater body and motive force than any of them. He is the strongest personality among English poets since Milton, though his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture. In Milton the passion was there, but it was held in check by the will and the artistic conscience, made subordinate to good ends, ripened by long reflection, and finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious beauty. Byron's love of Nature was quite different in kind from Wordsworth's. Of all English poets he has sung most lyrically of that national theme, the sea; as witness, among many other passages, the famous apostrophe to the ocean which closes _Childe Harold_, and the opening of the third canto in the same poem, Once more upon the waters, etc. He had a passion for night and storm, because they made him forget himself. Most glorious night! Thou wert not sent for slumber! Let me be A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, A portion of the tempest and of thee! Byron's literary executor and biographer was the Irish poet, Thomas Moore, a born song-writer, whose _Irish Melodies_, set to old native airs, are, like Burns's, genuine, spontaneous singing, and run naturally to music. Songs such as the _Meeting of the Waters_, _The Harp of Tara_, _Those Evening Bells_, the _Light of Other Days_, _Araby's Daughter_, and the _Last Rose of Summer_ were, and still are, popular favorites. Moore's Oriental romance, _Lalla Rookh_, 1817, is overladen with ornament and with a sugary sentiment that clogs the palate. He had the quick Irish wit, sensibility rather than passion, and fancy rather than imagination. Byron's friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), was also in fiery revolt against all conventions and institutions, though his revolt proceeded not, as in Byron's case, from the turbulence of passions which brooked no restraint, but rather from an intellectual impatience of any kind of control. He was not, like Byron, a sensual man, but temperate and chaste. He was, indeed, in his life and in his poetry, as nearly a disembodied spirit as a human creature can be. The German poet, Heine, said that liberty was the religion of this century, and of this religion Shelley was a worshiper. His rebellion against authority began early. He refused to fag at Eton, and was expelled from Oxford for publishing a tract on the _Necessity of Atheism_. At nineteen, he ran away with Harriet Westbrook, and was married to her in Scotland. Three years later he deserted her for Mary Godwin, with whom he eloped to Switzerland. Two years after this his first wife drowned herself in the Serpentine, and Shelley was then formally wedded to Mary Godwin. All this is rather startling, in the bare statement of it, yet it is not inconsistent with the many testimonies that exist to Shelley's singular purity and beauty of character, testimonies borne out by the evidence of his own writings. Impulse with him took the place of conscience. Moral law, accompanied by the sanction of power, and imposed by outside authority, he rejected as a form of tyranny. His nature lacked robustness and ballast. Byron, who was at the bottom intensely practical, said that Shelley's philosophy was too spiritual and romantic. Hazlitt, himself a Radical, wrote of Shelley: "He has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced." It was, perhaps, with some recollection of this last-mentioned trait of Shelley the man, that Carlyle wrote of Shelley the poet, that "the sound of him was shrieky," and that he had "filled the earth with an inarticulate wailing." His career as a poet began, characteristically enough, with the publication, while at Oxford, of a volume of political rimes, entitled _Margaret Nicholson's Remains_, Margaret Nicholson being the crazy woman who tried to stab George III. His boyish poem, _Queen Mab_, was published in 1813; _Alastor_ in 1816, and the _Revolt of Islam_--his longest--in 1818, all before he was twenty-one. These were filled with splendid, though unsubstantial, imagery, but they were abstract in subject, and had the faults of incoherence and formlessness which make Shelley's longer poems wearisome and confusing. They sought to embody his social creed of perfectionism, as well as a certain vague pantheistic system of belief in a spirit of love in nature and man, whose presence is a constant source of obscurity in Shelley's verse. In 1818 he went to Italy, where the last four years of his life were passed, and where, under the influences of Italian art and poetry, his writing became deeper and stronger. He was fond of yachting, and spent much of his time upon the Mediterranean. In the summer of 1822 his boat was swamped in a squall, off the Gulf of Spezzia, and Shelley's drowned body was washed ashore, and burned in the presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt. The ashes were entombed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, with the epitaph, _Cor cordium_. Shelley's best and maturest work, nearly all of which was done in Italy, includes his tragedy, _The Cenci_, 1819, and his lyrical drama, _Prometheus Unbound_, 1821. The first of these has a unity and a definiteness of contour unusual with Shelley, and is, with the exception of some of Robert Browning's, the best English tragedy since Otway. Prometheus represented to Shelley's mind the human spirit fighting against divine oppression, and in his portrayal of this figure he kept in mind not only the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus, but the Satan of _Paradise Lost_. Indeed, in this poem, Shelley came nearer to the sublime than any English poet since Milton. Yet it is in lyrical, rather than in dramatic, quality that _Prometheus Unbound_ is great. If Shelley be not, as his latest editor, Mr. Forman, claims him to be, the foremost of English lyrical poets, he is at least the most lyrical of them. He had, in a supreme degree, the "lyric cry." His vibrant nature trembled to every breath of emotion, and his nerves craved ever newer shocks; to pant, to quiver, to thrill, to grow faint in the spasm of intense sensation. The feminine cast observable in Shelley's portrait is borne out by this tremulous sensibility in his verse. It is curious how often he uses the metaphor of wings: of the winged spirit, soaring, like his skylark, till lost in music, rapture, light, and then falling back to earth. Three successive moods--longing, ecstasy, and the revulsion of despair--are expressed in many of his lyrics; as in the _Hymn to the Spirit of Nature_ in _Prometheus_, in the ode _To a Skylark_, and in the _Lines to an Indian Air_--Edgar Poe's favorite. His passionate desire to lose himself in Nature, to become one with that spirit of love and beauty in the universe which was to him in place of God, is expressed in the _Ode to the West Wind_, his most perfect poem: Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is; What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep autumnal tone Sweet, though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one! In the lyrical pieces already mentioned, together with _Adonais_, the lines _Written in the Euganean Hills_, _Epipsychidion_, _Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples_, _A Dream of the Unknown_, and many others, Shelley's lyrical genius reaches a rarer loveliness and a more faultless art than Byron's ever attained, though it lacks the directness and momentum of Byron. In Shelley's longer poems, intoxicated with the music of his own singing, he abandons himself wholly to the guidance of his imagination, and the verse seems to go on of itself, like the enchanted boat in _Alastor_, with no one at the helm. Vision succeeds vision in glorious but bewildering profusion; ideal landscapes and cities of cloud "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." These poems are like the water-falls in the Yosemite, which, tumbling from a height of several thousand feet, are shattered into foam by the air, and waved about over the valley. Very beautiful is this descending spray, and the rainbow dwells in its bosom; but there is no longer any stream, nothing but an iridescent mist. The word _ethereal_ best expresses the quality of Shelley's genius. His poetry is full of atmospheric effects; of the tricks which light plays with the fluid elements of water and air; of stars, clouds, rain, dew, mist, frost, wind, the foam of seas, the phases of the moon, the green shadows of waves, the shapes of flames, the "golden lightning of the setting sun." Nature, in Shelley, wants homeliness and relief. While poets like Wordsworth and Burns let in an ideal light upon the rough fields of earth, Shelley escapes into a "moonlight-colored" realm of shadows and dreams, among whose abstractions the heart turns cold. One bit of Wordsworth's mountain turf is worth them all. By the death of John Keats (1796-1821), whose elegy Shelley sang in _Adonais_, English poetry suffered an irreparable loss. His _Endymion_, 1818, though disfigured by mawkishness and by some affectations of manner, was rich in promise. Its faults were those of youth, the faults of exuberance and of a sensibility, which time corrects. _Hyperion_, 1820, promised to be his masterpiece, but he left it unfinished--"a Titanic torso"--because, as he said, "there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." The subject was the displacement by Phoebus Apollo of the ancient sun-god, Hyperion, the last of the Titans who retained his dominion. It was a theme of great capabilities, and the poem was begun by Keats with a strength of conception which leads to the belief that here was once more a really epic genius, had fate suffered it to mature. The fragment, as it stands--"that inlet to severe magnificence"--proves how rapidly Keats's diction was clarifying. He had learned to string up his loose chords. There is nothing maudlin in _Hyperion_; all there is in whole tones and in the grand manner, "as sublime as Aeschylus," said Byron, with the grave, antique simplicity, and something of modern sweetness interfused. Keats's father was a groom in a London livery-stable. The poet was apprenticed at fifteen to a surgeon. At school he had studied Latin but not Greek. He, who of all the English poets had the most purely Hellenic spirit, made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the medium of classical dictionaries, translations, and popular mythologies; and later through the marbles and casts in the British Museum. His friend, the artist Haydon, lent him a copy of Chapman's Homer, and the impression that it made upon him he recorded in his sonnet, _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_. Other poems of the same inspiration are his three sonnets, _To Homer_, _On Seeing the Elgin Marbles_, _On a Picture of Leander_, _Lamia_, and the beautiful _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. But Keats's art was retrospective and eclectic, the blossom of a double root; and "golden-tongued Romance with serene lute" had her part in him, as well as the classics. In his seventeenth year he had read the _Faerie Queene_, and from Spenser he went on to a study of Chaucer, Shakspere and Milton. Then he took up Italian and read Ariosto. The influence of these studies is seen in his poem, _Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, taken from a story of Boccaccio; in his wild ballad, _La Belle Dame sans Merci_; and in his love tale, the _Eve of St. Agnes_,