It is impossible to say whether he might not have been a greater poet if he had not been in such haste to rebuild the world.  He would, one fancies, have been a better artist if he had had a finer patience of phrase.  On the other hand, his achievement even in the sphere of phrase and music is surpassed by no poet since Shakespeare.  He may hurry along at intervals in a cloud of second-best words, but out of the cloud suddenly comes a song like Ariel’s and a radiance like the radiance of a new day.  With him a poem is a melody rather than a manuscript.  Not since Prospero commanded songs from his attendant spirits has there been singing heard like the Hymn of Pan and The Indian Serenade. The Cloud is the most magical transmutation of things seen into things heard in the English language.  Not that Shelley misses the wonder of things seen.  But he sees things, as it were, musically.

    My soul is an enchanted boat
    Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
  Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.

There is more of music than painting in this kind of writing.

There is no other music but Shelley’s which seems to me likely to bring healing to the madness of the modern Saul.  For this reason I hope that Professor Herford’s fine edition of the shorter poems (arranged for the first time in chronological order) will encourage men and women to turn to Shelley again.  Professor Herford promises us a companion volume on the same lines, containing the dramas and longer poems, if sufficient interest is shown in his book.  The average reader will probably be content with Mr. Hutchinson’s cheap and perfect “Oxford Edition” of Shelley.  But the scholar, as well as the lover of a beautiful page, will find in Professor Herford’s edition a new pleasure in old verse.

XII.—­THE WISDOM OF COLERIDGE

(1) COLERIDGE AS CRITIC

Coleridge was the thirteenth child of a rather queer clergyman.  The Rev. John Coleridge was queer enough in having thirteen children:  he was queerer still in being the author of a Latin grammar in which he renamed the “ablative” the “quale-quare-quidditive case.”  Coleridge was thus born not only with an unlucky number, but trailing clouds of definitions.  He was in some respects the unluckiest of all Englishmen of literary genius.  He leaves on us an impression of failure as no other writer of the same stature does.  The impression may not be justified.  There are few writers who would not prefer the magnificent failure of a Coleridge to their own little mole-hill of success.  Coleridge was a failure in comparison not with ordinary men, but only with the immense shadow of his own genius.  His imperfection is the imperfection of a demi-god.  Charles Lamb summed up the truth about his genius as well as about his character in that final phrase, “an archangel a little damaged.”  This was said at a time when the archangel was much