almost preternaturally developed in no other poet, namely, his well-known
power to condense the most hydrogenic abstraction. Science can now educe
threads of such exquisite tenuity that only the feet of the tiniest
infant-spiders can ascend them; but up the filmiest insubstantiality
Shelley runs with agile ease. To him, in truth, nothing is abstract. The
dustiest abstractions

Start, and tremble under his feet,
And blossom in purple and red.

The coldest moon of an idea rises haloed through his vaporous
imagination. The dimmest-sparked chip of a conception blazes and
scintillates in the subtile oxygen of his mind. The most wrinkled AEson
of an abstruseness leaps rosy out of his bubbling genius. In a more
intensified signification than it is probable that Shakespeare dreamed
of, Shelley gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Here
afresh he touches the Metaphysical School, whose very title was drawn
from this habitual pursuit of abstractions, and who failed in that
pursuit from the one cause omnipresent with them, because in all their
poetic smithy they had left never a place for a forge. They laid their
fancies chill on the anvil. Crashaw, indeed, partially anticipated
Shelley's success, and yet further did a later poet, so much further that
we find it difficult to understand why a generation that worships Shelley
should be reviving Gray, yet almost forget the name of Collins. The
generality of readers, when they know him at all, usually know him by his
_Ode on the Passions_. In this, despite its beauty, there is still a
_soupcon_ of formalism, a lingering trace of powder from the eighteenth
century periwig, dimming the bright locks of poetry. Only the literary
student reads that little masterpiece, the _Ode to Evening_, which
sometimes heralds the Shelleian strain, while other passages are the sole