and are believed to prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr.
Keble, and, indeed, of the clergy in general. But, in spite of all
this, your poems, like the affections of the true lovers in
Theocritus, are yet "in the mouths of all, and chiefly on the lips
of the young." It is in your lyrics that you live, and I do not
mean that every one could pass an examination in the plot of
"Prometheus Unbound." Talking of this piece, by the way, a
Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in you a hankering after life
in a cave--doubtless an unconsciously inherited memory from cave-
man. Speaking of cave-man reminds me that you once spoke of
deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of the moral,
intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we now
agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave.

Fortunately you gave us "Adonais" and "Hellas" instead of this
treatise, and we have now successfully written the natural history
of Man for ourselves. Science tells us that before becoming a cave-
dweller he was a Brute; Experience daily proclaims that he
constantly reverts to his original condition. L'homme est un
mechant animal, in spite of your boyish efforts to add pretty girls
"to the list of the good, the disinterested, and the free."

Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of
Politics, were "the haunts meet for thee." Watching the yellow bees
in the ivy bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools,
watching the sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and
weaving all fair and fleeting things into a tissue where light and
music were at one, that was the task of Shelley! "To ask you for
anything human," you said, "was like asking for a leg of mutton at a
gin-shop." Nay, rather, like asking Apollo and Hebe, in the