the count against Shelley for small sins of omission and commission.

That the confused note-books described by Mr. Garnett imply care, not the reverse, must be evident to any one who thinks for a moment: these were Shelley's means of putting his thoughts on record at once as they came burning upon him; and they were never meant for any one's guidance but his own. It was a need inherent in the fiery exaltation of his lyric mood that the result should be set down at once; and, for mere temporary memoranda, it mattered not how intricately one poem. might be blended with another. He knew how to disentangle and write them fairly, or dictate them to Mrs. Shelley; and, had he lived to have the slightest suspicion how we should venerate every scrap of paper bearing the impress of his hand and pen, he would have taken ample care to place these note-books beyond our reach.

The subject of Shelley's method of composition, a right understanding of which is the first requisite for any one aspiring to edit his works, would be a very fruitful theme for prolonged discussion. In one of the keenest and at the same time most enthusiastic of recent contributions to Shelley literature this theme is very happily touched upon. I refer to an article in The Edinburgh Review for April 1871, written à propos of Mr. Rossetti's edition of Shelley; an article which I am authorized to connect with the name of Professor Thomas S. Baynes of St. Andrew's University, and which I cannot do better than quote.

"It is," says Professor Baynes, "a curious psychological problem how it is that amongst modern poets Shelley should be distinguished by his comparative neglect of minute verbal accuracy; how it comes to pass that the text even of poems which he himself carefully revised should be so extremely imperfect." Negligence, care, imperfection! This is a strange association of words; but in that association Professor Baynes seems to me to go right home to the facts of the case. The problem, he says, is, how it happens that in the poems which Shelley himself revised "there are grammatical laxities and metrical oversights, which are not only stumbling-blocks to readers of ordinary cultivation, but the despair of acute and accomplished verbal critics.

"This uncritical negligence, the want of minute accuracy in the details of his verse, seems to us intimately connected with the whole character of Shelley's mind, and especially with the lyrical sweep and intensity of his poetical genius. He had an intellect of the rarest delicacy and analytical strength, that intuitively perceived the most remote analogies, and discriminated with spontaneous precision the finest shades of sensibility, the subtilest differences of perception and emotion. He possessed a swift soaring and prolific imagination that clothed every thought and feeling with imagery in the moment of its birth, and instinctively read the spiritual meanings of material symbols. His fineness of sense was so exquisite that eye and ear and touch became, as it were, organs and inlets not

C

merely of sensitive apprehension, but of intellectual beauty and ideal truth. Every nerve in his slight but vigorous frame seemed to vibrate in unison with the deeper life of nature in the world around him, and, like the wandering harp, he was swept to music by every breath of material beauty, every gust of poetic emotion. Above all, he had a strength of intellectual passion and a depth of ideal sympathy that in moments of excitement fused all the powers of his mind into a continuous stream of creative energy, and gave the stamp of something like inspiration to all the higher productions of his muse. His very method of composition reflects these characteristics of his mind. He seems to have been urged by a sort of irresistible impulse to write, and displayed a vehement and passionate absorption in the work that recalls the old traditions of poetical frenzy and divine possession. His conceptions crowded so thickly upon him, were embodied in such exquisite verbal forms, and so enriched by illustrations flashed from remote and multiplied centres of association, that while the fever lasted his whole nature was carried impetuously forward on a full tide of mingled music and imagery. From this exuberance of poetical power some of his critics have reproached him with accumulating image upon image without pausing to select, discriminate, or contrast them. And it is no doubt true that there are passages in which metaphors and similies are heaped on each other in almost dazzling profusion. But even in his most opulent and ornate descriptions

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 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