The literary inspiration of those lines (and in pointing to this I mean no disparagement of Shelley's originality) is clearly born from a kind of mystical blending of Virgil's Heu, miserande puer! si qua fata aspera rumpas, and of Milton's So were I equall'd with them in renown. There are lines in Shelley's stanza-the first and the eighth, particularly-which are in no wise diminished by this association with two of the most celebrated passages in literature; yet a comparison of the stanza as a whole with the full parts of the Eneid and Paradise Lost shows quite as clearly the weakness of Shelley. It is inconceivable that Virgil or Milton should have held so loose a rein on his genius as to sink from "The inheritors of unfulfilled renown" to the vapid "Far in the Unapparent," or should have dropped immediately from the magnificent directness of Shelley's eighth verse (which rings like Lucan himself when most Roman) to the vague allegory of oblivion shrinking reproved. It would not be difficult to extend this kind of criticism to a considerable number of Shelley's most admired lyrics-to show, for instance, that the throbbing and tumultuous music of the great Ode to the West Wind straggles here and there to unmelodious conclusions, chiefly because the poet-like all his English compeers-disdained the inherent laws of the terza rima as these are exemplified in the works of Dante and the lesser Italian masters of the measure. There is no other metre in which it is so imperative to mould the thought to the pauses of the rhythm, under penalty of letting the rhymes hang as an impertinence instead of a support; but this lesson none of the English poets learned, and least of all was Shelley capable of such wise docility. Nevertheless, granted that Adonais may occasionally descend into bathos, if it contains also images of pure and radiant beauty, why not give ourselves to these, and pass the errors by? Doubtless that is the part of wisdom, so far as it is feasible; but here again we are blocked by certain insurmountable exclusions of taste. There is a pleasure, the highest critical joy, in the perfection and harmonious unity of such work as Milton's Lycidas, and he who has trained his mind to respond to that joy has by the very process rendered himself sensitive to false and obtrusive notes. He simply cannot read the stanza quoted from Adonais without suffering from the spirit of perversity at work within it. It is true, no doubt, that there are blemishesoccasional awkwardnesses of execution, failures of the imagination, even lapses of taste of a kind -which may not affect essentially our attitude toward an extensive work of art; but they are not the faults which throw a suspicion of obliquity or vanity upon the very sources of the artist's inspiration. These, I say, are the inevitable exclusions of taste. If a man avers that the thorough appreciation of Lycidas does not exclude for him an unmarred pleasure in Adonais, I can only suspect that he has never felt the full force of the former. This is by no means to say that the enjoyment of Milton deadens a man to all lower forms of literature. The commonplace or the small may in its own sphere be commendable and may afford a true relish to the finest palate; and, indeed, one of the functions of criticism is to set forth and so far as possible rescue from oblivion the inexhaustible entertainment of the lesser writers. But the humble is another thing than the false, the false is noxious just in proportion to the elevation of the genius to which it adheres. There is nothing mutually exclusive in the complete enjoyment of both Milton and Crabbe; it is at least questionable whether the same man can heartily admire both Milton and Shelley. WORDSWORTH THERE is not a great deal that is new in Mr. Knight's Letters of the Wordsworth Family,1 and the editing can only be described as chaotic, yet we may be thankful to have the correspondence of the poet and his household brought together in any form. Perhaps the nearest approach to a discovery is the clearer figure of Coleridge seen in the communications to and about him-a dethroned deity of the upper air, not commanding the winds but tossed hither and thither by every breath of the heavens. In his petulant weaknesses and sullen indolence and decay, and still more in the disturbing dæmonic quality of his personality, as he appears and disappears amid the sober circle of his friends, he is like a greater and more tragic Rossetti. As for the letters of Wordsworth himself, their character is already known. They are not precisely entertaining, but read thus together and in this companionship they impress one the more by 1 Letters of the Wordsworth Family. From 1787 to 1855. Collected and edited by William Knight. In three volumes. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1907. the hard dry light of the intellect they display-a rationalism that was always present with him, ready at times to temper and even to thwart his romantic enthusiasms. When prejudice was aroused or his moral sense outraged he could indeed be amazingly perverse. It would not be easy to find a word more wantonly inappropriate for Byron than "dunce"; nor is "the damnable tendency" of such works as Don Juan likely to be diminished by branding "the despicable quality of the powers requisite for their production." Wordsworth might have learned from that poet's satire on himself— Who, both by precept and example, shows That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose, etc. how much more effective it is to exaggerate the virtuous weaknesses of an enemy than to belittle his vicious strength. But these errors of judgment are not common. In general, his critical remarks turn on a dogged determination to bend language to the minute exigencies of thought and emotion, and show how from this passionate integrity of mind, rather than from any peculiar sensitiveness to beauty, he also learned "that poetry is infinitely more of an art than the world is disposed to believe." And when, in the intercourse with a sympathetic friend, he speaks of his intimate ambition, there is something in his unflinching self-assertion and |