t the time. This play, being more
intelligible than the rest, attracted both notice and praise, though it
was also much blamed for what would now be called its unpleasantness.
Many people, among them his wife, regretted that, having proved his
ability to handle the concrete, he still should devote himself to ideal
and unpopular abstractions, such as 'The Witch of Atlas' (1821), a
fantastical piece in rime royal, which seems particularly to have
provoked Mrs. Shelley. A "lady Witch" lived in a cave on Mount Atlas,
and her games in a magic boat, her dances in the upper regions of space,
and the pranks which she played among men, are described in verse of a
richness that bewilders because it leads to nothing. The poet juggles
with flowers and gems, stars and spirits, lovers and meteors; we
are constantly expecting him to break into some design, and are as
constantly disappointed. Our bewilderment is of a peculiar kind; it is
not the same, for instance, as that produced by Blake's prophetic
books, where we are conscious of a great spirit fumbling after the
inexpressible. Shelley is not a true mystic. He is seldom puzzled, and
he never seems to have any difficulty in expressing exactly what he
feels; his images are perfectly definite. Our uneasiness arises from
the fact that, with so much clear definition, such great activity in
reproducing the subtlest impressions which Nature makes upon him,
his work should have so little artistic purpose or form. Stroke is
accumulated on stroke, each a triumph of imaginative beauty; but as they
do not cohere to any discoverable end, the total impression is apt to be
one of effort running to waste.

This formlessness, this monotony of splendour, is felt even in 'Adonais'
(1821), his elegy on the death of Keats. John Keats was a very different
person from Shelley. The son of a livery-stable keeper, he had been an
apothecary's apprentice, and for a short time had walked the hospitals.
He was driven into literature by sheer artistic passion, and not at all
from any craving to ameliorate the world. His odes are among the chief
glories of the English language. His life, unlike Shelley's, was devoted
entirely to art, and was uneventful, its only incidents an unhappy
love-affair, and the growth, hastened by disappointed passion and the
'Quarterly Review's' contemptuous attack on his work, of the consumption
which killed him at the age of twenty-six. He was sent to Italy as a
last chance. Shelley,