through which humanitarian passion may run--the first whispers
of hope, the devotion of the pioneer, the joy of freedom and
love, in triumph exultation tempered by clemency, in defeat
despair ennobled by firmness. And although in this
extraordinary production Shelley has still not quite found
himself, the technical power displayed is great. The poem is
in Spenserian stanzas, and he manages the long breaking wave of
that measure with sureness and ease, imparting to it a rapidity
of onset that is all his own. But there are small blemishes
such as, even when allowance is made for haste of composition
(it was written in a single summer), a naturally delicate ear
would never have passed; he apologises in the preface for one
alexandrine (the long last line which should exceed the rest by
a foot) left in the middle of a stanza, whereas in fact there
are some eight places where obviously redundant syllables have
crept in. A more serious defect is the persistence, still
unassimilated, of the element of the romantic-horrible. When
Laon, chained to the top of a column, gnaws corpses, we feel
that the author of Zastrozzi is still slightly ridiculous,
magnificent though his writing has become. It is hard, again,
not to smile at this world in which the melodious voices of
young eleutherarchs have only to sound for the crouching slave
to recover his manhood and for tyrants to tremble and turn
pale. The poet knows, as he wrote in answer to a criticism,
that his mission is "to apprehend minute and remote
distinctions of feeling," and "to communicate the conceptions
which result from considering either the moral or the material
universe as a whole." He does not see that he has failed of
both aims, partly because 'The Revolt' is too abstract, partly
because it is too definite. It is neither one thing nor the