l loveliness of nature and his own
misery is a piteous puzzle. On the beach near Naples

"The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might."

But

"Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned--
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.
Others I see whom these surround--
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;--
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure";

so that

"I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care."

The aching weariness that throbs in the music of these verses is not
mere sentimental self-pity; it is the cry of a soul that has known
moments of bliss when it has been absorbed in the sea of beauty that
surrounds it, only the moments pass, and the reunion, ever sought, seems
ever more hopeless. Over and over again Shelley's song gives us both the
fugitive glimpses and the mystery of frustration.

"I sang of the dancing stars,
I sang of the daedal Earth,
And of Heaven--and the giant wars,
And Love, and Death, and Birth,--
And then I changed my pipings,--
Singing how down the vale of Menalus
I pursued a maiden and clasp'd a reed:
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings."

Why is it that he is equal to the highest office of poetry in these sad
'cris de coeur' rather than anywhere else? There is one poem--perhaps
his greatest poem--which may suggest the answer. In the 'Sensitive
Plant' (1820) a garden is first described on which are lavished all his
powers of weaving an imaginary landscape out of flowers and light and
odour. All the flowers rejoice in one another's love and beauty except
the Sensitive Plant,

"For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower;
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not, the beautiful."

Now there was "a power in this sweet place, an Eve in this Eden." "A
Lady, the wonder of her kind," tended the flowers from earliest spring,
through the summer, "and,