"A pleasure sweet doubtless it was to see
Mortals subdued in all the shapes of sleep.
Here lay two sister-twins in infancy;
There a lone youth who in his dreams did weep;
Within, two lovers linked innocently
In their loose locks which over both did creep
Like ivy from one stem; and there lay calm
Old age with snow-bright hair and folded palm."
Shelley feels with the streams, which are loved by the sea and
disappear in his depths; he sings by the death-bed and bier of nature
in autumn and winter; he remembers the flowers that were strewn over
Adonis; he describes the goddess of the summer and of beauty, who (like
a female Balder) tends the flowers of the gardens; and he paints the
progress of the Spirits of the Hours through the heavens (_Arethusa,
Hymn of Apollo, Hymn of Pan, Autumn, The Sensitive Plant_, the Hours in
_Prometheus Unbound_),
For everything in life and nature he has found the fitting poetic
word--for the waste and solitary places,
"Where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be";
for time,
"Unfathomable sea, whose waves are years!
Ocean of time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!"
for snow, "and all the forms of the radiant frost."
The whole poem in which these last words occur ought to be read. Into
it, in a sad mood, he has compressed all his love of nature. It is
called simply _Song_, and is addressed to the Spirit of Delight. This
Spirit, the poet complains, has deserted him; it forgets all but those
who need it not; and such an one as he, can never win it back again,
for it is dismayed with sorrow, and reproach it will not hear. Yet, he
goes on to say,
"I love all that thou lovest,
Spirit of Delight!
The fresh earth in new leaves dressed,
And the starry night,
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.
I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves and winds and storms,--
Everything almost
Which is Nature's, and may be
Untainted by man's misery.
I love tranquil solitude.
And such society
As is quiet, wise, and good.
Between thee and me
What difference? But thou dost possess
The things I seek, not love them less."
But Shelley's spirit rises on the wings of his sublime enthusiasm for
liberty high into the clear air above all these mournful moods. His ode
_To a Skylark_, the poem which indicates the transition to the poetry
of liberty, is written in a perfect intoxication of joy and freedom
from care. It is almost safe to assert that there had been nothing
in the older English literature finer in its way than the best of
Wordsworth's songs to the lark, which are so typical of the spirit and
art of the Lake School.
"Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
A privacy of glorious light is thine,"
writes Wordsworth; and, as the true conservative poet, he goes on to
apostrophise the lark as
"Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam--
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home."