ther tongue, could it be said with more surety, that the pursuit of the
spirit of beauty dominates all his work. For Shelley it interfused all
nature and to possess it was the goal of all endeavour. The visible
world and the world of thought mingle themselves inextricably in his
contemplation of it. For him there is no boundary-line between the two,
the one is as real and actual as the other. In his hands that old trick
of the poets, the simile, takes on a new and surprising form. He does
not enforce the creations of his imagination by the analogy of natural
appearances; his instinct is just the opposite--to describe and illumine
nature by a reference to the creatures of thought. Other poets, Keats
for instance, or Tennyson, or the older poets like Dante and Homer,
might compare ghosts flying from an enchanter like leaves flying before
the wind. They might describe a poet wrapped up in his dreams as being
like a bird singing invisible in the brightness of the sky. But Shelley
can write of the west wind as

"Before whose unseen presence the leaves, dead,
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,"

and he can describe a skylark in the heavens as

"Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought."

Of all English poets he is the most completely lyrical. Nothing that he
wrote but is wrought out of the anguish or joy of his own heart.

"Most wretched souls,"

he writes

"Are cradled into poetry by wrong
They learn in suffering what they teach in song."

Perhaps his work is too impalpable and moves in an air too rarefied. It
sometimes lacks strength. It fails to take grip enough of life. Had he
lived he might have given it these things; there are signs in his last
poems that he would have given it. But he could hardly have bettered the
sheer and triumphant lyricism of _The Skylark_, of some of his choruses,
and of the _Ode to Dejection_, and of the _Lines written on the Eugenoen
hills_.

If the Romantic sense of the one-ness of nature found its highest
exponent in Shelley, the Romantic sensibility to outward impressions
reached its climax in Keats. For him life is a series of sensations,
felt with almost febrile acuteness. Records of sight and touch and smell
crowd every line of his work; the scenery of a garden in Hampstead
becomes like a landscape in the tropics, so extraordinary vivid and
detailed is his apprehension and enjoyment of what it has to give him.
The luxuriance of his sensations is matched