es of exquisite beauty, for which alone they are worth reading. In
the drama called _The Cenci_ (1819), which is founded upon a morbid Italian
story, Shelley for the first and only time descends to reality. The
heroine, Beatrice, driven to desperation by the monstrous wickedness of her
father, kills him and suffers the death penalty in consequence. She is the
only one of Shelley's characters who seems to us entirely human.

Far different in character is _Epipsychidion_ (1821), a rhapsody
celebrating Platonic love, the most impalpable, and so one of the most
characteristic, of all Shelley's works. It was inspired by a beautiful
Italian girl, Emilia Viviani, who was put into a cloister against her will,
and in whom Shelley imagined he found his long-sought ideal of womanhood.
With this should be read _Adonais_ (1821), the best known of all Shelley's
longer poems. _Adonais_ is a wonderful threnody, or a song of grief, over
the death of the poet Keats. Even in his grief Shelley still preserves a
sense of unreality, and calls in many shadowy allegorical figures,--Sad
Spring, Weeping Hours, Glooms, Splendors, Destinies,--all uniting in
bewailing the loss of a loved one. The whole poem is a succession of dream
pictures, exquisitely beautiful, such as only Shelley could imagine; and it
holds its place with Milton's _Lycidas_ and Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ as one
of the three greatest elegies in our language.

In his interpretation of nature Shelley suggests Wordsworth, both by
resemblance and by contrast. To both poets all natural objects are symbols
of truth; both regard nature as permeated by the great spiritual life which
animates all things; but while Wordsworth finds a spirit of thought, and so
of communion between nature and the soul of man, Shelley finds a spirit of
love, which exists chiefly for its own delight; and so "The Cloud," "The
Skylark," and "The West Wind," three of the most beautiful poems in our
language, have no definite message for humanity. In his "Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty" Shelley is most like Wordsworth; but in his "Sensitive
Plant," with its fine symbolism and imagery, he is like nobody in the world
but himself. Comparison is sometimes an excellent thing; and if we compare
Shelley's exquisite "Lament," beginning "O world, O life, O time," with
Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," we shall perhaps understand both
poets better. Both poems recall many happy memories of youth; both express
a very rea