the power of the murder scene-the one Mab," and another yet earlier poem, exquisite bit, no more, of natural descrip- which he wrote along with Medwin, down tion which occurs in it-and the art by to his "positively last appearance" in which the fiendish horrors of the begin-"Hellas." What strange charm the idea ning prepare for, and melt away into, the had over Shelley's mind we cannot tell; heartrending pathos of the end. How unless, perhaps, a resemblance between beautiful and affecting the last words of his own destiny and crime, and those of Beatrice, as she is being led along with this fugitive and vagabond on the face of her mother to early and horrible death: the earth. As it is, he makes in "Hellas" a very noble exit indeed. "Give yourself no unnecessary pain, often Have we done this for one another! now in style and merit; some of them most Shelley's smaller pieces are very various ingeniously and ineffably impenetrable; others as lovely and lively, or as soft and plaintive little morsels as ever dropped from human pen. Such, for instance, are the sweet and pure Anacreontic, beginning, "The fountains mingle with the Meant for the first of a series, it stands river;" the "Lines to an Indian Air;" the alone, the best of Shelley's productions; "Lines written in dejection at Naples;" the first tragedy since Shakspere, and the "Hymn to a Skylark," which might be one of the first poems in this or any age. set to that blithest of birds' own music, "Hellas" the poet himself called a and whose words dance like a fay in the mere improvise, but it is full of a rapid, silver shine of the moon; the "Sensitive torrent-like eloquence. As a drama it Plant," the sweetest, strangest, dreamiest, limps; but as a poem it storms and hur-thing in all his poetry, with that figure ries on like a very Phlegethon. The re- of the nameless lady in it, glorifying her volution in Greece-in Greece! a coun- garden for evermore; the "Ode to Naples," try which had become a standing exam-mounting into the very dome of the ple, moral, and monument of degeneracy, Temple of the Lyric Muse; the "Poem bursting out suddenly as if its stagnant on the Aziola," and her "sad cry;" the waters had been disturbed by an angel "Lines on the Euganean Hills," with plunging amid them from the battlements their eloquent remonstrance to the "Swan of heaven-roused the soul of Shelley, of Albion," then soiling his desperate then just falling asleep in its misery. It wing in the "sins and slaveries foul” "Vesuvius wakening Etna," and of the sea-Sodom; the "Mont Blanc;" the result is before us in this the most "Julian and Maddalo," with its fine porvigorous and volcanic of his secondary traiture of Byron and himself in the unpoems, in which the lava stream of his dress of their Titanic souls, "rolling bilfeelings, scattering away his frequent liard-balls about," instead of pointing mists, runs, and rushes, and roars, with their batteries against the wide-mouthed a motion like that of Byron's fierce ge- artillery of heaven; and, lastly, "Peter nius, when it produced the "Siege of Bell the Third," which, published since Corinth." In a kindred strain of rapid his death, has discovered an under-curvehemence, does Shelley exult over the rent of burning sarcasm to have run on downfal of the Turks, and predict the re-in secret under the lake of his genius. surrection of old Greece. It is a wild prophetic impromptu, half-white foam, and half-red fire, lyrical withal, and only shadowed by the mystic shape of Ahasuerus; for here he takes a final farewell of the 'Wandering Jew," a figure which had haunted his genius all along from "Queen was Shelley's prose works must not be omitted from the catalogue, if works they can be called, which were never meant for anything else than occasional effusions. They include two or three translations from Plato, the prefaces to his various poems, a few essays and criticisms, published posthumously, and a selection march stately and majestic, their criticism from his correspondence. Yet, brief and profound, Thus loftily does he describe unlaboured as they are, they raise our his poetical education:-"I have been estimation of the man. They are free familiar from boyhood with mountains from the fever and wildness of his poetry. and lakes, and the sea, and the solitude Their sentiment is finely generous and of forests. Danger, which sports upon discriminating. Their tone of criticism the brink of precipices, has been my contrasts well with the exclusiveness of playmate. I have trodden the glaciers the Lakers. Shelley had an intensely of the Alps, and lived under the eye of catholic taste, tremblingly alive to every Mont Blanc. I have been a wanderer variety and degree of excellence, equally among distant fields; I have sailed down fond of the Grecian and the Gothic mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and schools; loving at once Keats and Moore, set, and the stars come forth, whilst I Bowles and Byron, Leigh Hunt and Cole- have sailed night and day down a rapid ridge, Hogarth and Leonardo da Vinci. stream among mountains. I have seen His criticisms bring out the peculiarities populous cities, and have watched the of his authors or painters, amid a blaze passions which rise and spread, and sink of native beauty, a halo communicated and change, amongst assembled multiby his own mind. Raphael was his tudes of men. I have seen the theatre especial favourite; and he held strong of the more visible ravages of tyranny opinions as to his superiority to Michael and war; cities and villages reduced to Angelo, whose style he thought hard, scattered groups of black and roofless coarse, and savage. His estimates of the houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting remains of the classic school-of the famished on their desolated thresholds. Minerva the Niobe, "shielding her chil- I have conversed with living men of dren from some divine and inevitable genius. The poetry of ancient Greece wrong"-the Bacchantes, with their "hair and Rome, and modern Italy, and our caught in the whirlwind of their tempes-own country, has been, to me, like extuous dance"-are confessedly superior ternal nature, a passion and enjoyment. even to Winkelman's. They are distin- Such are the sources from which the imaguished by chaste and Grecian beauty. gery of my poems is generally drawn." His prefaces are undoubtedly too pre- The correspondence of Shelley is dissumptuous, too plainly prejudicating the tinguished by all his characteristics-his case, and flinging down defiance in the fancy, feeling, fire, purity of sentiment, face of the public. Now, without wish-feminine delicacy of taste, mild stateliing that he had descended to indite any ness of diction, and, in addition to all servile apology of such feeble depreca- this, by a piercing sagacity of observation of doom he was, indeed, incapable tion, and instinctive propriety of senti-we could have liked if he had followed ment, on every-day topics, which you a more just and modest taste in this could never have expected from the vimatter;-if stung though he was by de-sionary cast of his poetry. How clearly preciation into an intense and almost in- he sees through Lord Byron, amid his sane consciousness of himself, he had admiration! how awake is he to his copied the example of John Keats, whose foibles! how honest in his advices! how preface to "Endymion" is, in our judg- alive in some points-alas! not in allment, an ideal specimen of such things, to his true power, his true fame, and filled, as it is, with a proud and noble happiness! how deeply chagrined and humility. "No feeling man," he says, disgusted at his miserable desecration of "will be forward to inflict punishment on noble powers and amplest opportunities! me; he will leave me alone, knowing that How different from the crawling sycothere is not a fiercer hell than the failure phants, who were glad to lick the very in a great object." Still the tone of slime of sin from his proud feet! What Shelley's prefaces is trumpet-like, their tender gleams, too, are cast, in the same correspondence, upon Shelley's domestic pair of eyes in a lady's breast; or writfeelings and habits, on his love to his ing to Rowland Hill for the use of Surwife and family, on his amiable, forgiv-rey Chapel to preach his peculiar views ing, and benevolent disposition. Alto- in; or, like Dr Johnson, lifting a poor gether to parody an expression of Dr houseless outcast upon his back, and Johnson's-let him who would attain an carrying her to a place of refuge; or runEnglish style, chaste but not cold, classi-ning about from cottage to cottage, in cal but not stiff, energetic but never ex- Marlow, visiting and helping the sick; travagant, clear but never shallow, pro- or swallowing endless cups of tea; or found but never mystic, give his days basking in the hottest beams of an Italian and his nights to the prose of Shelley. sun, till he had made men suspect that he We are writing a criticism, not a life. had been designed for the planet Mercury; But we would refer those who would or, though on all other subjects the wisest know more about his personal and pri- of the wise, the gentlest of the gentle, vate manners, to Leigh Hunt's and Med-the bravest of the brave, yet, when one win's "Reminiscences;" to Talfourd's topic was introduced, becoming straight"Oration in Defence of Moxon;" to a way insane, his eyes glaring, his voice series of papers which appeared in the screaming, his hand vibrating frenzy; or "New Monthly Magazine, entitled, sailing in his crazy, Charonlike boat upon "Shelley at Oxford;" and to the recent the Serchio; or seen entering a wood near life by his early friend, Captain Medwin. Pisa, a little before his death, at a time All agree in describing him as the most when he was miles away-his character, warm-hearted, the most disinterested, on the whole, was one of the most interthe most childlike, and, withal, the most esting, and his life among the most roeccentric of human beings. Whether mantic, in literary story. Every one must lying asleep on the hearth-rug, with his remember the catastrophe which robbed small round head thrust into almost the the world of this wonderful being. Everyvery fire; or launching on the Serpen- body knows that, on the news of the artine, in defect of a paper boat, a fifty- rival of Leigh Hunt in Italy, Shelley pound note; or devouring large pieces of hastened to meet him. During all the dry bread, amid his profound abstrac- time he spent in Leghorn, he was in tions; or stalking along the streets of brilliant spirits-to him ever a sure progLondon, with his long and quiet steps; nostic of coming evil. On his return to or snatching a child from its nurse's his home and family, his skiff was overarms, shaking, the while, his long fair taken by a fearful hurricane, and all on locks, and asking what it remembered of board perished. His body, when found, its antenatal state; or now scalding and was in a state unfit for removal. It was, now half-poisoning himself with chemical therefore, under the auspices of Byron experiments; or discussing a point in and Hunt, burned on the sea-shore, all Plato, under the twilight trees, with far- but the heart, which would not consume. heard shrieking voice; or taking Leigh To a gentleman who, at the time, was Hunt by the two hands, and asking him, with a glass surveying the sea, the scene with the most comical earnestness and of his drowning assumed a very striking grief, "Can you tell me the amount of appearance. A great many vessels were the national debt?" or, another time, in visible, and among them one small skiff, a stage-coach, unintentionally terrifying which attracted his particular attention. an old lady out of her wits, by saying Suddenly a dreadful storm, attended suddenly to his companion, in quotation by thunder and columns of lightning, from Shakspere, "Hunt, I pray thee, let swept over the sea, and eclipsed the prous sit upon the ground, and tell strange spect. When it had passed, he looked stories of the deaths of kings;" or rush- again. The larger vessels were all safe, 'ng out of the room, in sweltering terror, riding upon the swell, the skiff only had as his wild imagination painted to him a gone down for ever. And in that skiff Note. There is much in this paper the author would not write now; being convinced, however, that Shelley on the subject still an admiration of the man's sincerity, as of religion was absolutely insane, and having well as genius, we permit it to stand, contenting ourselves with adding a caveat to the readers of that edition of his works published by Moxon, in reference to the many abominations and blasphemies contained in many parts of it, and retained, we have heard, in opposition to the wishes of some of the poet's wisest and warmest friends. We allude to was Alastor! Here he had met his fate. I THOMAS HOOD. shrinks in timidity from the face of his inner nature-shies the stoop of the descending Pythonic power, and, feeling that if he wept at all it were floods of burning and terrible tears, laughs, and does little else but laugh, instead. It is the lot of some men of genius to be to the pathetic and the fantastic-serious, born as if between Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Penseroso," their proximity to both originally equal, and their adhesion to the one or the other depending upon casual circumstances. While some pendulate perpetually between the grave and the gay, others are carried off bodily, We look upon this writer as a quaint as it happens, by the comic or the tragic masquer—as wearing above a manly and muse. A few there are who seem to say, profound nature a fantastic and delibeof their own deliberate option, "Mirth, rate disguise of folly. He reminds us of with thee we mean to live"-deeming it Brutus, cloaking under pretended idiocy better to go to the house of feasting than a stern and serious design which burns to that of mourning; while the storm of in his breast, but which he chooses in this adversity drives others to pursue sad and way only to disclose. A deep message dreary paths, not at first congenial to has come to him from the heights of his their natures. Such men as Shakspere, nature, but, like the ancient prophet, he Burns, and Byron, continue, all their is forced to cry out, "I cannot speak-I lives long, to pass, in rapid and perpe-am a child!" tual change, from the one province to Certainly there was, at the foundation the other; and this, indeed, is the main of Hood's soul, a seriousness which all source of their boundless ascendency his puns and mummeries could but inover the general mind. In Young of differently conceal. Jacques, in the fothe “Night Thoughts," the laughter, rest of Arden, mused not with a pronever very joyous, is converted, through founder pathos, or in quainter language, the effect of gloomy casualties, into the upon the sad pageant of humanity than ghastly grin of the skeleton Death-the does he; and yet, like him, his "lungs" pointed satire is exchanged for the are ever ready to " crow like chanticleer" solemn sermon. In Cowper, the fine at the sight of its grotesquer absurdities. schoolboy glee which inspirits his hu- Verily, the goddess of melancholy owes a mour goes down at last, and is quenched like a spark in the wild abyss of his madness" John Gilpin" merges in the Castaway." Hood, on the other hand, with his strongest tendencies originally deep grudge to the mirthful magician who carried off such a promising votary. It is not every day that one who might have been a great serious poet will condescend to sink into a punster and editor of comic annuals. And, were it not that ballads in size, they are books in the his original tendencies continued to be reader's feeling. Every one knows how manifested to the last, and that he turn-resistance adds to the idea of extension, ed his drollery to important account, we and how roughness impedes progress. would be tempted to be angry, as well as to regret, that he chose to play the fool rather than King Lear in the play. Some of Hood's poems, such as "Lycus," are rough as the centaur's hide; and, having difficulty in passing along, you are tempted to pass them by altogether. And though a few, feeling that there is around them the power and spell of genius, generously cry, "There's true As a poet, Hood belongs to the school of John Keats and Leigh Hunt, with qualities of his own, and an all but entire freedom from their peculiarities of manner and style. What strikes us, in metal here, when we have leisure we the first place, about him, is his great must return to this," yet they never do. variety of subject and mode of treatment. In fact, Hood has not been able to infuse His works are in two small duodecimo human interest into his fairy or mythovolumes; and yet we find in them five logical creations. He has conceived them or six distinct styles attempted and in a happy hour; surely on one of those attempted with success. There is the days when the soul and nature are oneclassical there is the fanciful, or, as we when one calm bond of peace seems to might almost call it, the "Midsummer unite all things-when the sun seems to Night”—there is the homely tragic nar- slumber, and the sky to smile—when the rative there is the wildly grotesque air becomes a wide balm, and the low there is the light, and there is the grave wind, as it wanders over flowers, seems and pathetic, lyric. And, besides, there telling some happy tidings in each gorgeis a style, which we despair of describing ous ear, till the rose blushes a deep crimby any one single or compound epithet, son, and the tulip lifts up a more towerof which his "Elm Tree" and "Haunted ing head, and the violet shrinks more House" are specimens resembling Ten-modestly away as at lovers' whispers; in nyson's "Talking Oak"-and the secret such a favoured hour-when the first and power of which, perhaps, lie in the strain of music might have arisen, or the feeling of mystic correspondence between first stroke of painting been drawn, or man and inanimate nature, in the start of the chisel of the first sculptor been heard, momentary consciousness with which we or the first verse of poetry been chanted, sometimes feel that in nature's company or man himself, a nobler harmony than we are not alone, that nature's silence is lute ever sounded, a finer line than not that of death; and are aware, in a painter ever drew, a statelier structure high and grand sense, that we are "made and a diviner song, arisen from the dust of dust." We know few volumes of did the beautiful idea of the "Plea of poetry where we find, in the same compass, so little mannerism, so little selfrepetition, such a varied concert, along with such unique harmony of sound. the Midsummer Fairies" dawn upon this poet's mind. But although he has conceived his fairies in a happy hour, and framed them with exquisite skill and a Through these varied numerous styles, fine eye to poetic proportion, he has not we find two or three main elements dis- made them alive-he has not made them tinctly traceable in all Hood's poems. objects of love; and you care less for his One is a singular subtlety in the percep- centaurs and his fairies than you do for tion of minute analogies. The weakness, the moonbeams or the shed leaves of the as well as the strength of his poetry, is forest. How different with the Oberon derived from this source. His serious and the Titania of Shakspere! They are verse, as well as his witty prose, is laden true to the fairy ideal, and yet they are and encumbered with thick-coming fancies. human-their hearts warm with human Hence, some of his finest pieces are tedious passions, are fond of gossip, flattery, inwithout being long. Little more than trigue, and quarrel, as men or women |