and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject
with ore," was giving him advice which, though admirable, it
was impossible that he should follow. Shelley was not merely
not a craftsman by nature, he was not the least interested in
those matters which are covered by the clumsy name of
"technique." It is characteristic of him that, while most
great poets have been fertile coiners of new words, his only
addition to the language is the ugly "idealism" in the sense of
"ideal object." He seems to have strayed from the current
vocabulary only in two other cases, both infelicitous--"glode"
for "glided," and "blosmy" for "blossomy." He did not, like
Keats, look on fine phrases with the eye of a lover. His taste
was the conventional taste of the time. Thus he said of Byron's
'Cain', "It is apocalyptic, it is a revelation not before
communicated to man"; and he thought Byron and Tom Moore better
poets than himself. As regards art, he cheapened Michael
Angelo, and the only things about which he was enthusiastic in
Italy, except the fragments of antiquity which he loved for
their associations, were the paintings of Raphael and Guido
Reni. Nor do we find in him any of those new metrical effects,
those sublime inventions in prosody, with which the great
masters astonish us. Blank verse is a test of poets in this
respect, and Shelley's blank verse is limp and characterless.
Those triumphs, again, which consist in the beauty of
complicated wholes, were never his. He is supreme, indeed, in
simple outbursts where there is no question of form, but in
efforts of longer breath, where architecture is required, he
too often sprawls and fumbles before the inspiration comes.

Yet his verse has merits which seem to make such criticisms