Fair are others; none beholds thee. 
    But thy voice sounds low and tender,
    Like the fairest, for it folds thee
    From the sight, that liquid splendour,
    And all feel, yet see thee never,
    As I feel now, lost for ever!

    Lamp of Earth! where’er thou movest
    Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,
    And the souls of whom thou lovest
    Walk upon the winds with lightness,
    Till they fail, as I am failing,
    Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!

It has been said that Shelley, as a landscape painter, is decidedly Turneresque; and there is much in “Prometheus Unbound” to justify this opinion.  The scale of colour is light and aerial, and the darker shadows are omitted.  An excess of luminousness seems to be continually radiated from the objects at which he looks; and in this radiation of many-coloured lights, the outline itself is apt to be a little misty.  Shelley, moreover, pierced through things to their spiritual essence.  The actual world was less for him than that which lies within it and beyond it.  “I seek,” he says himself, “in what I see, the manifestation of something beyond the present and tangible object.”  For him, as for the poet described by one of the spirit voices in “Prometheus”, the bees in the ivy-bloom are scarcely heeded; they become in his mind,—­

    Forms more real than living man,
    Nurslings of immortality.

And yet who could have brought the bees, the lake, the sun, the bloom, more perfectly before us than that picture does? (Forman, volume 2 page 181.) What vignette is more exquisitely coloured and finished than the little study of a pair of halcyons in the third act? (Forman, volume 2 page 231.) Blake is perhaps the only artist who could have illustrated this drama.  He might have shadowed forth the choirs of spirits, the trailing voices and their thrilling songs, phantasmal Demorgorgon, and the charioted Hour.  Prometheus, too, with his “flowing limbs,” has just Blake’s fault of impersonation—­the touch of unreality in that painter’s Adam.

Passing to “The Cenci”, we change at once the moral and artistic atmosphere.  The lyrical element, except for one most lovely dirge, is absent.  Imagery and description are alike sternly excluded.  Instead of soaring to the empyrean, our feet are firmly planted on the earth.  In exchange for radiant visions of future perfection, we are brought into the sphere of dreadful passions—­all the agony, endurance, and half-maddened action, of which luckless human innocence is capable.  To tell the legend of Beatrice Cenci here, is hardly needed.  Her father, a monster of vice and cruelty, was bent upon breaking her spirit by imprisonment, torture, and nameless outrage.  At last her patience ended; and finding no redress in human justice, no champion of her helplessness in living man, she wrought his death.  For this she died upon the scaffold, together with her step-mother and her brothers, who had aided