there is hardly a trace of conscious labour or deliberate effort. In his higher work the brilliant diction and splendid imagery glow with kindled emotion, and are wrought into the very substance of the poem by the sustained vehemence and rapture of his impassioned verse. Many of his most exquisite pieces were in this way produced almost at a sitting at a single heat, as it were-and some of his longest poems, such as The Revolt of Islam and The Cenci, were completed in a few months. Once engrossed with a great poetical conception, all his powers were kindled to a pitch of the highest intensity, and amidst the crowding realities of imagination the whole world of sense grew pale and dim, and everything around became for the time unsubstantial as a dream.

"This power of complete and passionate absorption in an ideal world of his own had marked Shelley from his earliest years. The stories told of his boyhood and youth strikingly illustrate this feature of his character... Shelley himself, however, gives the most vivid picture of this abstracted mood in the description of the poet by one of the spirits in Prometheus :

He will watch from dawn to gloom

The lake-reflected sun illume

The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,

Nor.heed nor see, what things they be;

But from these create he can

Forms more real than living man,

Nurslings of immortality!

Shelley's 'nurslings of immortality' were produced in such

seasons of rapt and exulting vision, and they bear in every part authentic and indelible marks of their origin. The verbal obscurities and metrical defects that have given his critics so much trouble are amongst these marks. The thoughts and feelings and images that crowded upon him he was in the habit of committing to paper with the utmost rapidity, and so that the expression was clear and rhythmical enough to be for the moment a kind of musical transcript of what was passing in his own mind, he was satisfied. He could not pause to elaborate the niceties of diction while new and stimulating thoughts, fresh and more brilliant images, were every moment pressing for utterance. If any difficulty as to word or phrase arose, instead of staying to remove it, he left a blank and passed on to embody the fresh visions of ethereal beauty that filled the inward eye before they again faded into the obscurity out of which they had so swiftly arisen. Or he would sometimes give within brackets tentative or alternative expressions, to be afterwards examined and decided on more at leisure. When he returned to revise and complete the unfinished or fragmentary piece, his mind evidently kindled afresh into something like its first ardour, and the work was matured under conditions of poetical excitement similar to those that accompanied its birth. And once fairly finished he busied himself to get the new creation of his brain printed as soon as possible. His eagerness to publish and the reason he gives for it are highly interesting and characteristic. If you ask me,' he

says, writing to his friend Trelawney, 'why I publish what 'few or none will care to read, it is that the spirits I have 'raised haunt me until they are sent to the devil of a 'printer... The real reason was, of course, that his mind being full of new conceptions he wanted to be free for fresh creative efforts. In this way, having once published a poem, he considered himself to have done with it, and rarely attempted afterwards anything in the shape of critical revision. Nor in the first printing did he make any important alterations or correct the press with any great care."

In regard to the penultimate sentence, it is right to remark that The Revolt of Islam, at all events, Shelley was anxious to revise for a second edition, and in fact enquired with some insistence of Mr. Ollier whether an opportunity was likely to occur. "I have many corrections," he says (Shelley Memorials, p. 153), "to make in it, and one part will be wholly remodelled." And again (p. 159), "I could materially improve that poem on revision." I have been unable to ascertain that he ever carried out this project, and hardly suspect that he did; but the proposal must be taken for what it is worth in contemplating Shelley's mental attitude towards those works that he had seen safely launched in type.

In the expression, "Nor in the first printing did he make any important alterations or correct the press with any great care," Professor Baynes does not of course imply any want of due earnestness; but here again I must partially

dissent. The unique proof-leaf inserted in Shelley's own copy of Laon and Cythna (see pages 95 to 97 of this volume and also Appendix II.) seems to me to indicate modifications important enough; and I think there is at all events a strong probability that great fastidiousness, involving in the event pretty considerable revisions of the proof sheets are at the root of the marvellously corrupt state of the original edition of Laon and Cythna. I have, however, dwelt at some length on this subject in the appendix to the present volume, and need only add here that the Alastor volume bears no evidence of careless revision, and that The Cenci and Adonais, printed in Italy under Shelley's own supervision expressely in order to avoid error, though characteristically inconsistent in minute details, shew remarkably few actual errors left undetected by Shelley. What he may have done in the way of modification on the proof-sheets, there are no data on which to form a hypothesis. With this note of partial dissent, I return to Professor Baynes's remarks; and they certainly qualify to some extent the expression from which I have dissented: "Not that Shelley was careless as to expression, or at all wanting in critical power. On the contrary, he had the finest instinct for language, which he had early cultivated so as to acquire a wonderful mastery over the more vivid, ideal, and expressive elements of poetical diction. But for this, indeed, with his rapid habit of composition, eagerness to print, and neglect of all after revision, the verbal difficulties of his poems would be far more serious than they

are. Again, his prose critical faculty of the

writings show that he possessed a rarest delicacy and penetration, a

power of philosophical analysis of the keenest edge and finest temper. But the persistent exercise of this faculty upon his own poetry would have required an amount of deliberation and delay, a coolness of temperament, a power of standing aloof from his own work and regarding it in a purely objective point of view wholly foreign to Shelley's nature. In seasons of inspiration he concentrated his whole soul on the work in hand, wrought strenuously to invest his poetical conceptions with 'the light of language,' and present them to the world in the most perfect form, and having done so he deliberately left them to their fate. To have occupied himself afterwards in touching and retouching the finished work would have been in his view a waste of time. Such careful and minute critical revision could in any case only be undertaken in intervals of leisure as a reaction and relief from creative effort. But Shelley was always producing; the completion of one poetical work being almost invariably followed by the commencement of another."

Still, we know that, before his poems went to the press he did not regard it as a waste of time to touch and retouch them; and I must confess I do not think he would ever have regarded as a waste of time the removal of anything that he recognized as a blemish. The fact is, however, that our current notions on the subject of artistic blemishes are crude, narrow, and conventional; and I do