upper regions of space, and the pranks which she played among
men, are described in verse of a richness that bewilders
because it leads to nothing. The poet juggles with flowers and
gems, stars and spirits, lovers and meteors; we are constantly
expecting him to break into some design, and are as constantly
disappointed. Our bewilderment is of a peculiar kind; it is
not the same, for instance, as that produced by Blake's
prophetic books, where we are conscious of a great spirit
fumbling after the inexpressible. Shelley is not a true
mystic. He is seldom puzzled, and he never seems to have any
difficulty in expressing exactly what he feels; his images are
perfectly definite. Our uneasiness arises from the fact that,
with so much clear definition, such great activity in
reproducing the subtlest impressions which Nature makes upon
him, his work should have so little artistic purpose or form.
Stroke is accumulated on stroke, each a triumph of imaginative
beauty; but as they do not cohere to any discoverable end, the
total impression is apt to be one of effort running to waste.

This formlessness, this monotony of splendour, is felt even in
'Adonais' (1821), his elegy on the death of Keats. John Keats
was a very different person from Shelley. The son of a
livery-stable keeper, he had been an apothecary's apprentice,
and for a short time had walked the hospitals. He was driven
into literature by sheer artistic passion, and not at all from
any craving to ameliorate the world. His odes are among the
chief glories of the English language. His life, unlike
Shelley's, was devoted entirely to art, and was uneventful, its
only incidents an unhappy love-affair, and the growth, hastened
by disappointed passion and the 'Quarterly Review's'