in a great measure the correlative of his chief quality—­the ideality, of which I have already spoken.  He composed with all his faculties, mental, emotional, and physical, at the utmost strain, at a white heat of intense fervour, striving to attain one object, the truest and most passionate investiture for the thoughts which had inflamed his ever-quick imagination.  The result is that his finest work has more the stamp of something natural and elemental—­the wind, the sea, the depth of air—­than of a mere artistic product.  Plato would have said:  the Muses filled this man with sacred madness, and, when he wrote, he was no longer in his own control.  There was, moreover, ever-present in his nature an effort, an aspiration after a better than the best this world can show, which prompted him to blend the choicest products of his thought and fancy with the fairest images borrowed from the earth on which he lived.  He never willingly composed except under the impulse to body forth a vision of the love and light and life which was the spirit of the power he worshipped.  This persistent upward striving, this earnestness, this passionate intensity, this piety of soul and purity of inspiration, give a quite unique spirituality to his poems.  But it cannot be expected that the colder perfections of Academic art should always be found in them.  They have something of the waywardness and negligence of nature, something of the asymmetreia we admire in the earlier creations of Greek architecture.  That Shelley, acute critic and profound student as he was, could conform himself to rule and show himself an artist in the stricter sense, is, however, abundantly proved by “The Cenci” and by “Adonais”.  The reason why he did not always observe this method will be understood by those who have studied his “Defence of Poetry”, and learned to sympathize with his impassioned theory of art.

Working on this small scale, it is difficult to do barest justice to Shelley’s life or poetry.  The materials for the former are almost overwhelmingly copious and strangely discordant.  Those who ought to meet in love over his grave, have spent their time in quarrelling about him, and baffling the most eager seeker for the truth. (See Lady Shelley v.  Hogg; Trelawny v. the Shelley family; Peacock v.  Lady Shelley; Garnett v.  Peacock; Garnett v.  Trelawny; McCarthy v.  Hogg, etc., etc.) Through the turbid atmosphere of their recriminations it is impossible to discern the whole personality of the man.  By careful comparison and refined manipulation of the biographical treasures at our disposal, a fair portrait of Shelley might still be set before the reader with the accuracy of a finished picture.  That labour of exquisite art and of devoted love still remains to be accomplished, though in the meantime Mr. W.M.  Rossetti’s Memoir is a most valuable instalment.  Shelley in his lifetime bound those who knew him with a chain of loyal affection, impressing observers so essentially different as Hogg, Byron,