and in the point of passionate eloquence even superior to Milton’s youthful lament for his friend.  “The ‘Adonais’, in spite of its mysticism,” he writes to Ollier, “is the least imperfect of my compositions.”  “I confess I should be surprised if that poem were born to an immortality of oblivion.”  “It is a highly wrought piece of art, and perhaps better, in point of composition, than anything I have written.”  “It is absurd in any review to criticize ‘Adonais’, and still more to pretend that the verses are bad.”  “I know what to think of ‘Adonais’, but what to think of those who confound it with the many bad poems of the day, I know not.”  Again, alluding to the stanzas hurled against the infamous “Quarterly” reviewer, he says:—­“I have dipped my pen in consuming fire for his destroyers; otherwise the style is calm and solemn.”

With these estimates the reader of to-day will cordially agree.  Although “Adonais” is not so utterly beyond the scope of other poets as “Prometheus” or “Epipsychidion,” it presents Shelley’s qualities in a form of even and sustained beauty, brought within the sphere of the dullest apprehensions.  Shelley, we may notice, dwells upon the art of the poem; and this perhaps, is what at first sight will strike the student most.  He chose as a foundation for his work those laments of Bion for Adonis, and of Moschus for Bion, which are the most pathetic products of Greek idyllic poetry; and the transmutation of their material into the substance of highly spiritualized modern thought, reveals the potency of a Prospero’s wand.  It is a metamorphosis whereby the art of excellent but positive poets has been translated into the sphere of metaphysical imagination.  Urania takes the place of Aphrodite; the thoughts and fancies and desires of the dead singer are substituted for Bion’s cupids; and instead of mountain shepherds, the living bards of England are summoned to lament around the poet’s bier.  Yet it is only when Shelley frees himself from the influence of his models, that he soars aloft on mighty wing.  This point, too, is the point of transition from death, sorrow, and the past to immortality, joy, and the rapture of the things that cannot pass away.  The first and second portions of the poem are, at the same time, thoroughly concordant, and the passage from the one to the other is natural.  Two quotations from “Adonais” will suffice to show the power and sweetness of its verse.

The first is a description of Shelley himself following Byron and Moore—­the “Pilgrim of Eternity,” and Ierne’s “sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong”—­to the couch where Keats lies dead.  There is both pathos and unconscious irony in his making these two poets the chief mourners, when we remember what Byron wrote about Keats in “Don Juan”, and what Moore afterwards recorded of Shelley; and when we think, moreover, how far both Keats and Shelley have outsoared Moore, and disputed with Byron his supreme place in the heaven of poetry.