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.