asting, for example, Shelley's _Ode to the
West Wind_, with the famous and truly noble stanzas on the eternal sea
which close the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_, who does not feel that
there is in the first a volatile and unseizable element that is quite
distinct from the imagination and force and high impressiveness, or from
any indefinable product of all of these united, which form the glory and
power of the second? We may ask in the same way whether _Manfred_, where
the spiritual element is as predominant as it ever is in Byron, is worth
half a page of _Prometheus_.

To perceive and admit this is not to disparage Byron's achievements. To
be most deeply penetrated with the differentiating quality of the poet
is not, after all, to contain the whole of that admixture of varying and
moderating elements which goes to the composition of the broadest and
most effective work. Of these elements, Shelley, with all his rare gifts
of spiritual imagination and winged melodiousness of verse, was markedly
wanting in a keen and omnipresent feeling for the great course of human
events. All nature stirred him, except the consummating crown of natural
growth.

We do not mean anything so untrue as that Shelley was wanting either in
deep humanity or in active benevolence, or that social injustice was a
thing indifferent to him. We do not forget the energetic political
propagandism of his youth in Ireland and elsewhere. Many a furious
stanza remains to show how deeply and bitterly the spectacle of this
injustice burnt into his soul. But these pieces are accidents. They do
not belong to the immortal part of his work. An American original,
unconsciously bringing the revolutionary mind to the climax of all
utterances possible to it, has said that 'men are degraded when
considered as the members of a political organisation.'[2] Shelley's
position was on a yet more remote pinnacle than this. Of mankind he was
barely conscious, in his loftiest and divinest flights. His muse seeks
the vague translucent spaces where the care of man melts away in vision
of the eternal forces, of which man may be but the fortuitous
manifestation of an hour.

[Footnote 2: Thoreau.]

Byron, on the other hand, is never moved by the strength of his passion
or the depth of his contemplation quite away from the round earth and
the civil animal who dwells upon it. Even his misanthropy is only an
inverted form of social solicitude. His practical zeal for good and
nob