personifications of Spenser, and subserve a more practical
purpose as the exponents of a deep philosophy. They are the
outward embodiments of vital forces which are intimately
blended with the destinies of man. As such, the truthfulness
of the conceptions must be tested by a reference to the ideas
they are intended to convey, and the functions of those ideas
in bringing about the changes they are designed to illustrate. In
this respect, there can hardly be a doubt that Shelley ascended
to the height of his subject. His embodiments are instinct
with life. Their beauty is only such as could be caught by the
rapt vision of a poet's eye. The marvellous groupings of his
figures would suck the soul out of a sculptor. While their deep
tenderness remind us of the faces of Raphael's madonnas, their
voluptuous forms are hardly surpassed by the outlines of Titian
himself. Nature dawns upon us in a series of spiritual visions,
combining regions of fairy loveliness with the broad outlines of
a philosophy, which aims at realizing all the magical colouring
of the poet's visions, in the sphere of truth. That Shelley in
his "Prometheus,'' as well as in his " Hellas," with reference to
the poetry of his subject, and its ground-plan in the region
of abstract thought, surpasses ^Eschylus, few, I think, would be
disposed to deny ; but ^Eschylus wrote for an audience who felt
their own fortunes, and the folds of their social and religious
life, indissolubly blent with the poet's conceptions, and who, on
that account, could grasp them as substantial existences ; but
Shelley, for an audience, who regarded his conceptions as the
airy phantoms of a dream, never likely to be realized. Hence,
while the triumphs of the one are stereotyped in history, those
of the other only exist in the mind of the metaphysician.
