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“Hark, sister! what a low yet dread.

pause-from "Prometheus Un- times, and a kind of deafness bound." too seems to afflict people intermittently. How otherwise can we account for W. M. Rossetti's desire to amend the line

ful groan

Quite unsuppressed is tearing up the heart

Of the good Titan, as storms tear the deep,

And beasts hear the sea moan in inland

caves.

"Fresh Spring and Summer, and Winter hoar".

Darest thou observe how the fiends by forcibly inserting the word

torture him?"

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"Original" or not, can these lines give satisfaction to any trained ear? Are they, in truth, blank verse at all? They have no movement, but a kind of stagger. In that dynamic quality, which is more essential to blank verse than time is to music, they are entirely wanting. But perhaps argument is useless when it is a question of the ear.

The next point is one of feeling, and that too is difficult to conclude. Mrs Campbell strangely enough finds in the concluding speech of "The Cenci" nothing but what is prosaic and trivial; she calls it "bathos." But the simplicity of the words is exactly what makes them so piercing, and the simplicity of the action gives just the pathos of youth and innocence, touched with that dignity of hopelessness which a child in grief will sometimes wear. How any one miss the significance of

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"autumn after summer. stern conscientiousness about the seasons must have deprived him for the moment of his sense of hearing.

Long years ago, when recitation was in fashion, one had to suffer from the insane desire that often prompted some rash spirit to recite a poem of Shelley's. The fact is that the human voice is not delicate or flexible enough to reproduce those modulations, with their rise and fall, the soft hurry, the sudden pause, then the flood of melody. Shelley heard these things in the breezes, in the hush of the woods, by the running waters, and we have to let his poems sing themselves to to their own music, and not drown it with some harsh accompaniment of the voice.

Mrs Campbell is earnest in pointing out the hard study, both of languages and philosophy, which the poet made his daily work. Nearly all great poets have been very hard workers. Nothing in fact reduces the spirit to such a prosaically dead level as idleness, and from the beginning Shelley's interests had been many and varied. He left behind

him prose writings on various subjects, of real value, but often fragmentary. Mrs Campbell considers these, and very justly, as proofs that his thought was far in advance of his age, and much more in sympathy with our own. It is curious that in an essay on the 'Difficulty of Analysing the Human Mind' there should occur this passage, which is like an anticipation of some modern work on psycho-analysis.

"If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history of his being, from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might behold their own recollections, and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopes and fears-all that they dare not, or that, daring and desiring, they could not expose to the open eyes of day.

But thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and impetuous stream flows outward; or like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of some haunted pile, and dares not look behind."

In 1822 he was not yet thirty, and was at the height of his powers. Neither fame nor fortune had come to him, but in this there was no disappointment, for he expected neither. He had something which he cared a great deal more about,

and that was a boat of his own, built at Leghorn under the instructions of his friend Williams. They had spent the winter together at Pisa, and in the spring had removed to the lonely little seaside village of San Terenzo, in the gulf of Spezzia, where the two families lived together in a large old house on the very edge of the sea, with a long stone balcony looking over the waves. Shelley was never so happy in his life as at San Terenzo. He wrote to a friend about a week before his death

"I still inhabit this divine bay, reading Spanish dramas, and sailing, and listening to the most enchanting music. We have some friends on a visit to us, and my only regret is that the summer must ever pass, or that Mary has not the same predilection for this place which I have, which would induce me never to shift my quarters."

Mary was ill and depressed, and had other things to think of than the beauty of the bay and the mountains, their “ olive sandalled" slopes, and the moonlight falling on the sea. It is almost impossible that she did not realise the danger for Shelley of this new boat, and his sailing her in a bay so subject to squalls, absentminded as he was, not only unable to swim, but devoid of the most ordinary sense of self-preservation. She probably trusted to Williams, in the blind way that landsmen trust a sailor-as if he could control

the dangers of the deep because he knows something about them --and Williams probably trusted to luck. To make matters worse, Shelley was quite fearless. He threw himself into deep water one day, to see if that would teach him to swim; but as he made no effort to strike out, and only, as his friend said, "lay at the bottom like a conger eel," there was no result. He and Williams together built a little coracle at San Terenzo, in which Shelley would paddle round the shallow waters, and into the caves by moonlight, and keep himself, as he said, "safe from land bores." This was the only safety he provided for.

In their quiet, poetical, harmless way, they were in truth a reckless party. The story is well known of how Shelley once took Jane Williams and her two babies in his coracle and far out into the deep water, where he fell into a long and melancholy reverie, out of which he roused himself to say to her

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yacht, the Bolivar, at Leghorn, called in at San Terenzo soon after Shelley's boat, the Ariel, had arrived, and found them all in raptures. He wrote

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Williams is as touchy about her as if she had been his wife. They were hardly ever out of her, and talked of the Mediterranean as a lake too confined and tranquil to exhibit her sea-going excellence. went out for a sail . . . to see how they could manage her... As usual, Shelley had a book in hand, saying he could read and steer at the same time, as one was mental, the other mechanical. Luff!' said Williams. Shelley put the helm the wrong way."

This was how they appeared to the sailor. Possibly he thought exhortation would be thrown away upon a person who regarded steering as a mechanical process. But Shelley was happy, divinely happy, as he had never been before. He wrote

"We drive along this delightful bay in the evening

Now let us together solve wind, under a summer moon, the great mystery." until earth appears another world."

Terror gave her wit to remind him quietly that Mary would be waiting for them on shore; whereupon he sighed heavily, and took up his paddle again for the unwelcome return journey. It would all be funny enough if we did not know that he was so soon going to solve that mystery which from his boyhood had haunted him.

The other sailor, Trelawny, who was in charge of Byron's

Perhaps for him it was well worth while to be drowned as the price of such pleasure, keener than anything our dull faculties can realise. But we remember, as Jane did, that Mary was waiting on shore; that thought which caused him to sigh, and return "mechanically."

The end came when he and Williams, and a sailor-lad from

Leghorn, were out in the bay of Spezzia. A sudden squall and a thunderstorm broke over the sea together, and no one ever knew what happened to the Ariel. She was lost, and all three were drowned, the marvellous poet, his everyday kind-hearted friend, and the poor sailor - lad. Their

bodies were washed ashore, Shelley's at Viareggio, some few days later, where, according to the quarantine laws of Italy, they were burnt to ashes on the beach.

It seems strange to us at this day that the death of Shelley could pass almost unnoticed in England, yet not so strange as that his poetry could pass unnoticed too. The early nineteenth century was a curious age, both in the things it admired and in the things it neglected.

We owe Mrs Campbell thanks for a very interesting study, written with such a breadth of view and honesty of intention that it cannot fail to be valued and remembered long. As for her charge against the "Unromantics," as she calls them, it is not very well substantiated. People may argue endlessly about what constitutes the essence of Romance, but we generally find, as here, that terms are being used in an

arbitrary sense, and that the essence of Romance triumphantly eludes them all - a result which we cannot too joyfully celebrate. Mrs Campbell has some prejudices which she does not conceal, and prejudices make much less interesting reading than sympathies. Fortunately her sympathies are allied with a strong sense of fairness, and the alliance goes far towards making her criticism sound. Occasionally she has flashes of the true imaginative insight, which is in itself a kind of inspiration. The brightest of these must be quoted last, as it gives the best taste of her quality—

"Great passions, like other great things, make men forget that they are mortal. 'Nothing great,' says the chorus of the "Antigone," "enters into the life of mortals without a curse.' So deep is the gulf between Sophocles and the Romantic writers; above all, between Sophocles and Shakespeare; for to Shakespeare that very greatness is man's one abiding consolation. Shakespeare broke away from all religious doctrine: locked up the articles of his faith in his own heart, and poured into his works the inexhaustible fountain of his love of man and his belief in life."

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THE HIGHBROWS.

BY HELEN GRAHAM.

MRS DOWNIE, widow of the late Headmaster of Peden Knowe Primary School, was on her way to the Post Office. As a rule she avoided it on Saturday afternoons, for all the clash" of the countryside then took place there, and Mrs Downie was not one who cared to mix herself in other people's concerns. A letter, however, that required posting had caused her to deviate from custom.

From the top of the hill leading down to the Post Office a large poster in the "sweetie " window caught her eye and aroused her curiosity. The General Election was over two months ago, so this could be no political announcement, and yet the size of the lettering suggested information of national importance.

On a nearer view she read :

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Shakespeare! something new for Knowe. Music Hall Companies, with variety programmes, were getting quite common in the winter months, and last autumn the famous melodrama, 'Blood will Tell,' had brought its thrills to the village and, incidentally, to Mrs Downie, in spite of her prejudice against its title, but this was the first time that Peden Knowe had been offered Shakespeare.

Mrs Downie was roused from her examination of the poster by the tinkling of the Post Office door-bell and the appearance of Miss Jameson, the doctor's sister, carrying her week-end purchases.

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Coarse weather, Euphemia!" Mrs Downie accented the name as in Jeremiah. Then she pointed a gloved hand at the poster.

"I'm thinking it's quite a good idea to give the village something refined and out of the common for a change."

Mrs Downie felt it incumbent upon her to throw the mantle of her approval over Shakespeare, seeing that the late Mr Downie had always set such store by him at recitations and prize-givings.

Miss Jameson seemed to hesitate before replying. She had opened her mouth to say that

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