the intellect, if not the blood. But it must be remarked that
poetry inspired solely by revolutionary enthusiasm is liable to
one fatal weakness: it degenerates too easily into rhetoric.
To avoid being a didactic treatise it has to deal in high-flown
abstractions, and in Shelley fear, famine, tyranny, and the
rest, sometimes have all the emptiness of the classical manner.
They appear now as brothers, now as parents, now as sisters of
one another; the task of unravelling their genealogy would be
as difficult as it is pointless. If Shelley had been merely
the singer of revolution, the intensity and sincerity of his
feeling would still have made him a better poet than Byron; but
he would not have been a great poet, partly because of the
inherent drawbacks of the subject, partly because of his
strained and false view of "the moral universe" and of himself.
His song, in treating of men as citizens, as governors and
governed, could never have touched such a height as Burns' "A
man's a man for a' that."

Fortunately for our literature, Shelley did more than arraign
tyrants. The Romantic Movement was not merely a new way of
considering human beings in their public capacity; it meant
also a new kind of sensitiveness to their environment. If we
turn, say, from Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock' to Wordsworth's
'The Prelude', it is as if we have passed from a saloon crowded
with a bewigged and painted company, wittily conversing in an
atmosphere that has become rather stuffy, into the freshness of
a starlit night. And just as, on stepping into the open air,
the splendours of mountain, sky, and sea may enlarge our
feelings with wonder and delight, so a corresponding change may
occur in our emotions towards one another; in this setting of a