y and
sincerity of his feeling would still have made him a better poet than
Byron; but he would not have been a great poet, partly because of the
inherent drawbacks of the subject, partly because of his strained and
false view of "the moral universe" and of himself. His song, in treating
of men as citizens, as governors and governed, could never have touched
such a height as Burns' "A man's a man for a' that."

Fortunately for our literature, Shelley did more than arraign tyrants.
The Romantic Movement was not merely a new way of considering
human beings in their public capacity; it meant also a new kind of
sensitiveness to their environment. If we turn, say, from Pope's 'The
Rape of the Lock' to Wordsworth's 'The Prelude', it is as if we have
passed from a saloon crowded with a bewigged and painted company,
wittily conversing in an atmosphere that has become rather stuffy, into
the freshness of a starlit night. And just as, on stepping into the open
air, the splendours of mountain, sky, and sea may enlarge our feelings
with wonder and delight, so a corresponding change may occur in our
emotions towards one another; in this setting of a universe with which
we feel ourselves now rapturously, now calmly, united, we love with less
artifice, with greater impetuosity and self-abandonment. "Thomson and
Cowper," says Peacock, "looked at the trees and hills which so many
ingenious gentlemen had rhymed about so long without looking at them,
and the effect of the operation on poetry was like the discovery of a
new world." The Romantic poets tended to be absorbed in their trees and
hills, but when they also looked in the same spirit on their own
hearts, that operation added yet another world to poetry. In Shelley the
absorption of the self in nature is carried to its furthest point. If
the passion to which nature moved him is less deeply meditated than
in Wordsworth and Coleridge, its exuberance is wilder; and in his best
lyrics it is inseparably mingled with the passion which puts him among
the world's two or three greatest writers of love-poems.

Of all his verse, it is these songs about nature and love that every one
knows and likes best. And, in fact, many of them seem to satisfy what is
perhaps the ultimate test of true poetry: they sometimes have the
power, which makes poetry akin to music, of suggesting by means of words
something which cannot possibly be expressed in words. Obviously the
test is impossible to use with any