s sadness is faint and restrained:

"I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden,
Thou needest not fear mine;
My spirit is too deeply laden
Ever to burthen thine."

At other times it flows with the fulness of despair, as in

"I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?"

or in

"When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead--
When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow's glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot."

The very rapture of the skylark opens, as he listens, the wound at his
heart:

"We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."

Is the assertion contained in this last line universally true? Perhaps.
At any rate it is true of Shelley. His saddest songs are the sweetest,
and the reason is that in them, rather than in those verses where he
merely utters ecstatic delight, or calm pleasure, or bitter indignation,
he conveys ineffable suggestions beyond what the bare words express.

It remains to point out that there is one means of conveying such
suggestions which was outside the scope of his genius. One of the
methods which poetry most often uses to suggest the ineffable is by
the artful choice and arrangement of words. A word, simply by being
cunningly placed and given a certain colour, can, in the hands of a good
craftsman, open up indescribable vistas. But Keats, when, in reply to a
letter of criticism, he wrote to him, "You might curb your magnanimity,
and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore,"
was giving him advice which, though admirable, it was impossible that he
should follow. Shelley was not merely not a craftsman by nature, he
was not the least interested in those matters which are covered by the
clumsy name of "technique." It is characteristic of him that, while most
great poets have been fertile coiners of new words, his only addition to
the language is the ugly "idealism" in the sense of "ideal object."
He seems to have strayed from the current vocabular