last monotony!

Too beautiful to laugh at, however empty and sentimental. True: but
why beautiful? Because there is a certain sincerity in it, which
breeds coherence and melody, which, in short, makes it poetry. But
what if such a tone of mind be consciously encouraged, even
insincerely affected as the ideal state for a poet's mind, as his
followers have done?

The mischief which such a man would do is conceivable enough. He
stands out, both by his excellences and his defects, as the spokesman
and ideal of all the unrest and unhealth of sensitive young men for
many a year after. His unfulfilled prophecies only help to increase
that unrest. Who shall blame either him for uttering those
prophecies, or them for longing for their fulfilment? Must we not
thank the man who gives us fresh hope that this earth will not be
always as it is now? His notion of what it will be may be, as
Shelley's was, vague, even in some things wrong and undesirable.
Still, we must accept his hope and faith in the spirit, not in the
letter. So have thousands of young men felt, who would have shrunk
with disgust from some of poor Shelley's details of the "good time
coming." And shame on him who should wish to rob them of such a
hope, even if it interfered with his favourite "scheme of unfulfilled
prophecy." So men have felt Shelley's spell a wondrous one--perhaps,
they think, a life-giving regenerative one. And yet what dream at
once more shallow and more impossible? Get rid of kings and priests;
marriage may stay, pending discussions on the rights of women. Let
the poet speak--what he is to say being, of course, a matter of
utterly secondary import, provided only that he be a poet; and then
the millennium will appear of itself, and the devil be exorcised with
a kiss from all hearts--except, of course, these of "pale priests"
and "tyrants with their sneer of cold command" (who, it seems, have
not been got rid of after all), and the Cossacks and Croats whom they
may choose to call to their rescue. And on the appearance of the
said Cossacks and Croats, the poet's vision stops short, and all is
blank beyond. A recipe for the production of millenniums which has
this one advantage, that it is small enough to be comprehended by the
very smallest minds, and reproduced thereby, with a difference, in
such spasmodic melodies as seem to those small minds to be imitations
of Shelley's nightingale notes.

For nightingale notes they truly