Now, in the description of natural scenes that kind of effect is beyond Shelley's reach, though he has many pictures which are both detailed and emotional. Consider, for instance, these lines from 'The Invitation' (1822). He calls to Jane Williams to come away "to the wild woods and the plains,"
"Where the lawns and pastures be,
And the sandhills of the sea;—
Where the melting hoar-frost wets
The daisy-star that never sets,
And wind-flowers, and violets,
Which yet join not scent to hue,
Crown the pale year weak and new;
When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue moon is over us,
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun."
This has a wonderful lightness and radiance. And here is a passage of careful description from 'Evening: Ponte a Mare, Pisa':
"The sun is set; the swallows are asleep;
The bats are flitting fast in the gray air;
The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep,
And evening's breath, wandering here and there
Over the quivering surface of the stream,
Walkes not one ripple from its summer dream.
There is no dew on the dry grass to-night,
Nor damp within the shadow of the trees;
The wind is intermitting, dry and light;
And in the inconstant motion of the breeze
The dust and straws are driven up and down,
And whirled about the pavement of the town."
Evidently he was a good observer, in the sense that he saw details clearly—unlike Byron, who had for nature but a vague and a preoccupied eye—and evidently, too, his observation is steeped in strong feeling, and is expressed in most melodious language. Yet we get the impression that he neither saw nor felt anything beyond exactly what he has expressed; there is no suggestion, as there should be in great poetry, of something beyond all expression. And, curiously enough, this seems to be true even of those fanciful poems so especially characteristic of him, such as 'The Cloud' and 'Arethusa', where he has dashed together on his palette the most startling colours in nature, and composed out of them an extravagantly imaginative whole:
"The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead,
As on the jag of a mountain crag
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And, when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardours of rest and of love,
And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depths of heaven above,
With wings folded I rest, on my airy nest,
As still as a brooding dove."
Can he keep it up, we wonder, this manipulation of eagles and rainbows, of sunset and moonshine, of spray and thunder and lightning? We hold our breath; it is superhuman, miraculous; but he never falters, so vehement is the impulse of his delight. It is only afterwards that we ask ourselves whether there is anything beyond the mere delight; and realising that, though we have been rapt far above the earth, we have had no disturbing glimpses of infinity, we are left with a slight flatness of disappointment.
But disappointment vanishes when we turn to the poems in which ecstasy is shot through with that strain of melancholy which we have already noticed. He invokes the wild West Wind, not so much to exult impersonally in the force that chariots the decaying leaves, spreads the seeds abroad, wakes the Mediterranean from its slumber, and cleaves the Atlantic, as to cry out in the pain of his own helplessness and failure:
"Oh life me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud."
Or an autumn day in the Euganean hills, growing from misty morning through blue noon to twilight, brings, as he looks over "the waveless plain of Lombardy," a short respite: