Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.’
We pass on to some of Mr. Shelley’s smaller pieces and translations, which we think are in general excellent and highly interesting. His Hymn of Pan we do not consider equal to Mr. Keats’s sounding lines in the Endymion. His Mont Blanc is full of beauties and of defects; but it is akin to its subject, and presents a wild and gloomy desolation. Ginevra, a fragment founded on a story in the first volume of the ‘Florentine Observer,’ is like a troublous dream, disjointed, painful, oppressive, or like a leaden cloud, from which the big tears fall, and the spirit of the poet mutters deep-toned thunder. We are too much subject to these voluntary inflictions, these ‘moods of mind,’ these effusions of ‘weakness and melancholy,’ in the perusal of modern poetry. It has shuffled off, no doubt, its old pedantry and formality; but has at the same time lost all shape or purpose, except that of giving vent to some morbid feeling of the moment. The writer thus discharges a fit of the spleen or a paradox, and expects the world to admire and be satisfied. We are no longer annoyed at seeing the luxuriant growth of nature and fancy clipped into armchairs and peacocks’ tails; but there is danger of having its stately products choked with unchecked underwood, or weighed down with gloomy nightshade, or eaten up with personality, like ivy clinging round and eating into the sturdy oak! The Dirge, at the conclusion of this fragment, is an example of the manner in which this craving after novelty, this desire ‘to elevate and surprise,’ leads us to ‘overstep the modesty of nature,’ and the bounds of decorum.
‘Ere the sun through heaven once more has roll’d
The rats in her heart
Will have made their nest,
And the worms be alive in her golden hair,
While the spirit that guides the sun,
Sits throned in his flaming chair,
She shall sleep.’
The ‘worms’ in this stanza are the old and traditional appendages of the grave;—the ‘rats’ are new and unwelcome intruders; but a modern artist would rather shock, and be disgusting and extravagant, than produce no effect at all, or be charged with a want of genius and originality. In the unfinished scenes of Charles I., (a drama on which Mr. Shelley was employed at his death) the radical humour of the author breaks forth, but ‘in good set terms’ and specious oratory. We regret that his premature fate has intercepted this addition to our historical drama. From the fragments before us, we are not sure that it would be fair to give any specimen.