may choose to call to their rescue. And on the appearance of the
said Cossacks and Croats, the poet's vision stops short, and all is
blank beyond. A recipe for the production of millenniums which has
this one advantage, that it is small enough to be comprehended by the
very smallest minds, and reproduced thereby, with a difference, in
such spasmodic melodies as seem to those small minds to be imitations
of Shelley's nightingale notes.

For nightingale notes they truly are. In spite of all his faults--
and there are few poetic faults in which he does not indulge, to
their very highest power--in spite of his "interfluous" and
"innumerous," and the rest of his bad English--in spite of bombast,
horrors, maundering, sheer stuff and nonsense of all kinds, there is
a plaintive natural melody about this man, such as no other English
poet has ever uttered, except Shakespeare in some few immortal songs.
Who that has read Shelley does not recollect scraps worthy to stand
by Ariel's song--chaste, simple, unutterably musical? Yes, when he
will be himself--Shelley the scholar and the gentleman and the
singer--and leave philosophy and politics, which he does not
understand, and shriekings and cursings, which are unfit for any
civilised and self-respecting man, he is perfect. Like the American
mocking-bird, he is harsh only when aping other men's tunes--his true
power lies in his own "native wood-notes wild."

But it is not this faculty of his which has been imitated by his
scholars; for it is not this faculty which made him their ideal,
however it may have attracted them. All which sensible men deplore
in him is that which poetasters have exalted in him. His morbidity
and his doubt have become in their eyes his differential energy,
because too often, it was all in him with which they had wit to