r about poetry or politics? What is the spell that
must seal our lips, from uttering an opinion equally plain and
perspicuous concerning Mr. John Keats, viz., that nature possibly meant
him to be a much better poet than Mr. Leigh Hunt ever could have been,
but that, if he persists in imitating the faults of that writer, he must
be contented to share his fate, and be like him forgotten? Last of all,
what should forbid us to announce our opinion, that Mr. Shelley, as a
man of genius, is not merely superior, either to Mr. Hunt, or to Mr.
Keats, but altogether out of their sphere, and totally incapable of ever
being brought into the most distant comparison with either of them. It
is very possible, that Mr. Shelley himself might not be inclined to
place himself so high above these men as we do, but that is his affair,
not ours. We are afraid that he shares, (at least with one of them) in
an abominable system of belief, concerning Man and the World, the
sympathy arising out of which common belief, may probably sway more than
it ought to do on both sides. But the truth of the matter is this, and
it is impossible to conceal it were we willing to do so, that Mr.
Shelley is destined to leave a great name behind him, and that we, as
lovers of true genius, are most anxious that this name should ultimately
be pure as well as great.

As for the principles and purposes of Mr. Shelley's poetry, since we
must again recur to that dark part of the subject; we think they are on
the whole, more undisguisedly pernicious in this volume, than even in
his Revolt of Islam. There is an Ode to Liberty at the end of the
volume, which contains passages of the most splendid beauty, but which,
in point of meaning, is just as wicked as any thing that ever reached
the world under the name of Mr. Hunt himself. It is not difficult to
fill up the blank which has been left by the prudent bookseller, in one
of the stanzas beginning:

O that the free would stamp the impious name,
Of ----- into the dust! Or write it there
So that this blot upon the page of fame,
Were as a serpent's path, which the light air
Erases, etc., etc.

but the next speaks still more plainly:

O that the WISE from their bright minds would kindle
Such lamps within the dome of this wide world,
That the pale name of PRIEST might shrink and dwindle
Into the HELL from which it first was hurled!

This is exactly a versification of the foulest sentence that ever issued