universe with which we feel ourselves now rapturously, now
calmly, united, we love with less artifice, with greater
impetuosity and self-abandonment. "Thomson and Cowper," says
Peacock, "looked at the trees and hills which so many ingenious
gentlemen had rhymed about so long without looking at them, and
the effect of the operation on poetry was like the discovery of
a new world." The Romantic poets tended to be absorbed in
their trees and hills, but when they also looked in the same
spirit on their own hearts, that operation added yet another
world to poetry. In Shelley the absorption of the self in
nature is carried to its furthest point. If the passion to
which nature moved him is less deeply meditated than in
Wordsworth and Coleridge, its exuberance is wilder; and in his
best lyrics it is inseparably mingled with the passion which
puts him among the world's two or three greatest writers of
love-poems.

Of all his verse, it is these songs about nature and love that
every one knows and likes best. And, in fact, many of them
seem to satisfy what is perhaps the ultimate test of true
poetry: they sometimes have the power, which makes poetry akin
to music, of suggesting by means of words something which
cannot possibly be expressed in words. Obviously the test is
impossible to use with any objective certainty, but, for a
reason which will appear, it seems capable of a fairly
straightforward application to Shelley's work.

First we may observe that, just as the sight of some real
scene-- not necessarily a sunset or a glacier, but a ploughed
field or a street-corner--may call up emotions which "lie too