Too beautiful to laugh at, however empty and sentimental.  True:  but why beautiful?  Because there is a certain sincerity in it, which breeds coherence and melody, which, in short, makes it poetry.  But what if such a tone of mind be consciously encouraged, even insincerely affected as the ideal state for a poet’s mind, as his followers have done?

The mischief which such a man would do is conceivable enough.  He stands out, both by his excellences and his defects, as the spokesman and ideal of all the unrest and unhealth of sensitive young men for many a year after.  His unfulfilled prophecies only help to increase that unrest.  Who shall blame either him for uttering those prophecies, or them for longing for their fulfilment?  Must we not thank the man who gives us fresh hope that this earth will not be always as it is now?  His notion of what it will be may be, as Shelley’s was, vague, even in some things wrong and undesirable.  Still, we must accept his hope and faith in the spirit, not in the letter.  So have thousands of young men felt, who would have shrunk with disgust from some of poor Shelley’s details of the “good time coming.”  And shame on him who should wish to rob them of such a hope, even if it interfered with his favourite “scheme of unfulfilled prophecy.”  So men have felt Shelley’s spell a wondrous one—­perhaps, they think, a life-giving regenerative one.  And yet what dream at once more shallow and more impossible?  Get rid of kings and priests; marriage may stay, pending discussions on the rights of women.  Let the poet speak—­what he is to say being, of course, a matter of utterly secondary import, provided only that he be a poet; and then the millennium will appear of itself, and the devil be exorcised with a kiss from all hearts—­except, of course, these of “pale priests” and “tyrants with their sneer of cold command” (who, it seems, have not been got rid of after all), and the Cossacks and Croats whom they may choose to call to their rescue.  And on the appearance of the said Cossacks and Croats, the poet’s vision stops short, and all is blank beyond.  A recipe for the production of millenniums which has this one advantage, that it is small enough to be comprehended by the very smallest minds, and reproduced thereby, with a difference, in such spasmodic melodies as seem to those small minds to be imitations of Shelley’s nightingale notes.

For nightingale notes they truly are.  In spite of all his faults—­ and there are few poetic faults in which he does not indulge, to their very highest power—­in spite of his “interfluous” and “innumerous,” and the rest of his bad English—­in spite of bombast, horrors, maundering, sheer stuff and nonsense of all kinds, there is a plaintive natural melody about this man, such as no other English poet has ever uttered, except Shakespeare in some few immortal songs.  Who that has read Shelley does not recollect scraps worthy to stand by Ariel’s song—­chaste, simple, unutterably musical?  Yes, when he will be himself—­Shelley the scholar and the gentleman and the singer—­and leave philosophy and politics, which he does not understand, and shriekings and cursings, which are unfit for any civilised and self-respecting man, he is perfect.  Like the American mocking-bird, he is harsh only when aping other men’s tunes—­his true power lies in his own “native wood-notes wild.”