poetry—­such work as “Christabel”, the “Ancient Mariner”, or “Kubla Khan”—­is a product of pure artistic fancy, tempered by the author’s mysticism.  Keats, true and sacred poet as he was, loved Nature with a somewhat sensuous devotion.  She was for him a mistress rather than a Diotima; nor did he share the prophetic fire which burns in Shelley’s verse, quite apart from the direct enunciation of his favourite tenets.  In none of Shelley’s greatest contemporaries was the lyrical faculty so paramount; and whether we consider his minor songs, his odes, or his more complicated choral dramas, we acknowledge that he was the loftiest and the most spontaneous singer of our language.  In range of power he was also conspicuous above the rest.  Not only did he write the best lyrics, but the best tragedy, the best translations, and the best familiar poems of his century.  As a satirist and humourist, I cannot place him so high as some of his admirers do; and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate at intervals into poor rhetoric.

While his genius was so varied and its flight so unapproached in swiftness, it would be vain to deny that Shelley, as an artist, had faults from which the men with whom I have compared him were more free.  The most prominent of these are haste, incoherence, verbal carelessness, incompleteness, a want of narrative force, and a weak hold on objective realities.  Even his warmest admirers, if they are sincere critics, will concede that his verse, taken altogether, is marked by inequality.  In his eager self-abandonment to inspiration, he produced much that is unsatisfying simply because it is not ripe.  There was no defect of power in him, but a defect of patience; and the final word to be pronounced in estimating the larger bulk of his poetry is the word immature.  Not only was the poet young; but the fruit of his young mind had been plucked before it had been duly mellowed by reflection.  Again, he did not care enough for common things to present them with artistic fulness.  He was intolerant of detail, and thus failed to model with the roundness that we find in Goethe’s work.  He flew at the grand, the spacious, the sublime; and did not always succeed in realizing for his readers what he had imagined.  A certain want of faith in his own powers, fostered by the extraordinary discouragement under which he had to write, prevented him from finishing what he began, or from giving that ultimate form of perfection to his longer works which we admire in shorter pieces like the “Ode to the West Wind”.  When a poem was ready, he had it hastily printed, and passed on to fresh creative efforts.  If anything occurred to interrupt his energy, he flung the sketch aside.  Some of these defects, if we may use this word at all to indicate our sense that Shelley might by care have been made equal to his highest self, were