"Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb;
And happier they their happiness who knew,
Whose tapers yet burn thro' that night of time
In which suns perish'd; Others more sublime,
Struck by the envious wroth of man or God!!
Have sunk extinct in their refulgent prime;
And some yet live," &c.——
Now what is the meaning of this, or of any sentence of it, except indeed that horrid blasphemy which attributes crime to the Great Author of all virtue! The rest is mere empty absurdity. If it were worth our while to dilate on the folly of the production, we might find examples of every species of the ridiculous within those few pages.
Mr. Shelley summons all kinds of visions round the grave of this young man, who, if he has now any feeling of the earth, must shrink with shame and disgust from the touch of the hand that could have written that impious sentence. These he classifies under names, the greater number as new we believe to poetry as strange to common sense. Those are—
——"Desires and Adorations
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies,
Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears and twilight Phantasies,
And Sorrow with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears! led by the gleam
Of her own dying SMILE instead of eyes!!"
Let our readers try to imagine these weepers, and close with "blind Pleasure led," by what? "by the light of her own dying smile—instead of eyes!!!"
We give some specimens of Mr. S.'s
Nonsense—pastoral.
"Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,[M]
And feeds her grief with his remember'd lay,
And will no more reply to winds and fountains."
Nonsense—physical.
—"for whose disdain she (Echo) pin'd away
Into a shadow of all sounds!"
Nonsense—vermicular.
"Flowers springing from the corpse
———————————illumine death
And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath."
Nonsense—pathetic.
"Alas! that all we lov'd of him should be
But for our grief, as if it had not been,
And grief itself be mortal! WOE IS ME!"
Nonsense—nondescript.
"In the death chamber for a moment Death,
Blush'd to annihilation!"
Nonsense—personal.
"A pardlike spirit, beautiful and swift—
A love in desolation mask'd;—a Power
Girt round with weakness;—it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour!"
We have some idea that this fragment of character is intended for Mr. Shelley himself. It closes with a passage of memorable and ferocious blasphemy:—
———————-"He with a sudden hand
Made bare his branded and ensanguin'd brow,
Which was like Cain's or Christ's!!!"
What can be said to the wretched person capable of this daring profanation. The name of the first murderer—the accurst of God—brought into the same aspect image with that of the Saviour of the World! We are scarcely satisfied that even to quote such passages may not be criminal. The subject is too repulsive for us to proceed even in expressing our disgust for the general folly that makes the Poem as miserable in point of authorship, as in point of principle. We know that among a certain class this outrage and this inanity meet with some attempt at palliation, under the idea that frenzy holds the pen. That any man who insults the common order of society, and denies the being of God, is essentially mad we never doubted. But for the madness, that retains enough of rationality to be wilfully mischievous, we can have no more lenity than for the appetites of a wild beast. The poetry of the work is contemptible—a mere collection of bloated words heaped on each other without order, harmony, or meaning; the refuse of a schoolboy's common-place book, full of the vulgarisms of pastoral poetry, yellow gems and blue stars, bright Phoebus and rosy-fingered Aurora; and of this stuff is Keats's wretched Elegy compiled.