of formalism, a lingering trace of powder from the eighteenth century periwig, dimming the bright locks of poetry.  Only the literary student reads that little masterpiece, the Ode to Evening, which sometimes heralds the Shelleian strain, while other passages are the sole things in the language comparable to the miniatures of Il Penseroso.  Crashaw, Collins, Shelley—­three ricochets of the one pebble, three jets from three bounds of the one Pegasus!  Collins’s Pity, “with eyes of dewy light,” is near of kin to Shelley’s Sleep, “the filmy-eyed”; and the “shadowy tribes of mind” are the lineal progenitors of “Thought’s crowned powers.”  This, however, is personification, wherein both Collins and Shelley build on Spenser:  the dizzying achievement to which the modern poet carried personification accounts for but a moiety, if a large moiety, of his vivifying power over abstractions.  Take the passage (already alluded to) in that glorious chorus telling how the Hours come

      From the temples high
      Of man’s ear and eye
   Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy,

* * * * *

      From those skiey towers
      Where Thought’s crowned powers
   Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours! 
      Our feet now, every palm,
      Are sandalled with calm,
   And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm;
      And beyond our eyes
      The human love lies
   Which makes all it gazes on Paradise.

Any partial explanation will break in our hands before it reaches the root of such a power.  The root, we take it, is this.  He had an instinctive perception (immense in range and fertility, astonishing for its delicate intuition) of the underlying analogies the secret subterranean passages, between matter and soul; the chromatic scales, whereat we dimly guess, by which the Almighty modulates through all the keys of creation.  Because, the more we consider it, the more likely does it appear that Nature is but an imperfect actress, whose constant changes of dress never change her manner and method, who is the same in all her parts.

To Shelley’s ethereal vision the most rarified mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the sand of outward things.  He stood thus at the very junction-lines of the visible and invisible, and could shift the points as he willed.  His thoughts became a mounted infantry, passing with baffling swiftness from horse to foot or foot to horse.  He could express as he listed the material and the immaterial in terms of each other.  Never has a poet in the past rivalled him as regards this gift, and hardly will any poet rival him as regards it in the future:  men are like first to see the promised doom lay its hand on the tree of heaven and shake down the golden leaves. {7}