of personal happiness and liberty, but on account of the free access which, through them, his spirit obtained to the ideal region of the past. Shelley hated them because he saw in them only a brute barrier between mankind and the happy state he imagined for it in the future. The varied creations of Scott, therefore, are based on experience, common sense, and the continuity of tradition; the creations of Shelley rest on the hopes which he built in his aerial and splendid imagination, in whose rainbow colours the taint of evil that ever debars men from the sense of complete ideal satisfaction, is lost or transfigured. As to the soundness of this foundation for the of art, many suggestive inferences may be drawn from the character of Shelley's own work, and others from the nature of the parallel movement in poetry initiated by the genius of Coleridge and Keats. purposes V. POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: COLERIDGE. AND KEATS. In a passage of his 'Life of Byron,' interesting as giving a poet's estimate of the inspiring forces of his age, Moore describes the effects of the drama of the French Revolution on contemporary imagination. 'There are those,' says he, 'who trace, in the peculiar character of Lord Byron's genius, strong features of relationship to the times in which he lived; who think that the great events which marked the close of the last century, by giving a new impulse to men's minds, by habituating them to the daring and the free, and allowing full vent to the "flash and outbreak of fiery spirits," had naturally led to the production of such a poet as Byron; and that he was in short as much the child and representative of the Revolution, in poesy, as another great man of the age, Napoleon, was in statesmanship and warfare. Without going the full length of this notion, it will, at least, be conceded, that the free loose which had been given to all the passions and energies of the human mind, in the great struggle of that period, together with the constant spectacle of such astounding vicissitudes as were passing, almost daily, on the theatre of the world, had created, in all minds, and in every walk of intellect, a taste for strong excitement, which the stimulants supplied from ordinary sources were insufficient to gratify;—that a tame deference to established authorities had fallen into disrepute, no less in literature than in politics, and that the poet who should breathe into his songs the fierce and passionate spirit of the age, and assert, untrammelled and unawed, the high dominion of genius, would be most sure of an audience toned in sympathy with his strains.' Dull, indeed, must the spirit have been which failed to catch some inspiring fervour from the atmosphere of those extraordinary times. The ages of knight errantry seemed to have revived. While historic dynasties were overthrown in a single night, while every common soldier felt that he might carry his marshal's bâton in his knapsack, while obscure adventurers seated themselves on the most ancient thrones of Europe, it would have been strange if imagination had been anything but romantic. Byron may be the best poetical representative of the evolutionary forces of the period, but he is by |