to the spirit of the saintly mother who has approached to shield
from harm the beloved child for whom she died; we read it in the story
of the friendship and enmity between the Baron and Sir Roland de Vaux
of Tryermaine; we read it in the vision seen in the forest
by the minstrel Bard, of the bright green snake coiled around
the wings and neck of a fluttering dove; and, finally, we read it
in its most startling form, in the conclusion of the poem,
"A little child, a limber elf, singing, dancing to itself," etc.,
wherein is exhibited the strange tendency to express love's excess
"with words of unmeant bitterness". This dark principle of evil,
we may suppose, after dwelling in the poet's mind, in an abstract form,
crept into this broken poem, where it lies coiled up among
the choicest and most fragrant flowers, and occasionally springs
its warning rattle, and projects its forked tongue, to assure us of
its ugly presence.

Both these great poems show the influence of the revival of
the old English Ballads. Coleridge had drunk deep of their spirit.

Shelley and Byron were fully charged with the revolutionary spirit
of the time. Shelley, of all the poets of his generation,
had the most prophetic fervor in regard to the progress of
the democratic spirit. All his greatest poems are informed
with this fervor, but it is especially exhibited in
the `Prometheus Unbound', which is, in the words of Todhunter,
"to all other lyrical poems what the ninth symphony is to all
other symphonies; and more than this, for Shelley has here
outsoared himself more unquestionably than Beethoven in his last
great orchestral work. . . . The Titan Prometheus is the incarnation
of the genius of humanity, chained and suffering under the tyranny