each step downward is hurtful in its degree, whatever disguise it assumes, could be easily proved. Even the affectation of atheism, as in much of Byron's poetry, is an artistic expedient fraught with infinite danger to the user of it. Although one feels that the atheism of Byron is not real, but in most cases a mere stage property, one gets thoroughly sick of it before all his scowling heroes: the Laras, the Corsairs, the Giaours are painted in on the same gloomy and threadbare background-a varied fugue on the one everlasting theme-a change of costume, but the same old unhallowed anatomy visibly sticking through. Nothing short of the genius of Byron could have achieved even a partial success with such a clogging nightmare on its back.

It is perhaps not to be so much regretted that atheism should prove such a complete extinguisher to anything like second-rate poetical power, as that it should have sometimes dragged down to the second place gifts that should have ranked with the highest. It overshadows the resplendent genius of Shelley like a black thunder-cloud above a rainbow, and gives everything he has left behind him a phantasmagoric and evanescent character. Reading his works is like walking through the dreamlike palace of Kubla Khan. On every side, and in such profusion as has never been approached by man, lie the potentialities of poetry, but yet in a great measure only the potentialities. He has left no palace behind him worthy of his genius or his materials. If ever mortal had the materials, and the power of the enchanter to call them forth, it was he. No one ever possessed in a greater degree the faculty of bringing himself en rapport with the hallucination of the moment.

Images of the most ethereal ten

uity, that would have presented. themselves to other men's minds in some vague and nebulous way, stood forth to the order of that imperial imagination with the distinctness and precision of objective realities. And yet with all this power he is still but the enchanter. Wherever you go it is fairy-world still, and affords no solid ground for mortal foot; and though you cannot resist its haunting beauty, you are equally haunted by a sense of its almost ghastly unreality. The kindred points of heaven and home are even more nearly akin than they are commonly supposed. Shelley's inability to conceive a heaven with a God in it to whom he could pay reverence, seemed to drain away all humanness and homeliness out of him, until his poetry became quite as unearthly as his adverse critics judged it unheavenly. Starving one side of his moral nature, the other side was supersaturated, and rendered morbid by an overflow of the imaginative secretions that should have fed both. This insubstantial characteristic of his work was unfortunately one upon which Shelley rather prided himself. Writing to a friend, he says he "does not deal in flesh and blood." "You might as well," says he, "go to a gin-shop for a leg of mutton, as expect anything earthly from me.' want of fixity, too, which the absence of central faith invariably induces, that want of a peaceable mental anchorage-the green pastures and the still waters of the Hebrew poet, with whom, however, he has so much in common-acts as a continual drag on his powers. There is a provoking absence of that massive and leonine repose which usually consorts with the greatest gifts, and which one naturally looks for as a concomitant of his. But we look for it in vain. He was always in an ecstasy, in the

That

somewhat lost but literal meaning of the word—always out of himself. If his genius had a fault, it was too impressionable. The merest mouthful of the Delphian vapour put him into fits. He was ever on the tripod, and is only a modern incarnation of that priestess of Apollo, mentioned by Plutarch, who raved herself to death in the temple. His Pegasus in this way was good for a short run, but had little waiting power. Consequently, the defect does not interfere with the perfection of his shorter lyrics, which are simply unique and unapproached; but its limiting influence is painfully apparent in all his works (though less marked in the Cenci) that require any long sustained effort. The deficiency was one well understood and keenly felt by Shelley himself. In a letter to Godwin, he says, "I cannot but be conscious, in much of what I write, of an absence of that tranquillity which is the attribute and accompaniment of power."

Sad indeed that this defect, this want of reference to the fundamental key-note of power, should have marred the music of such an otherwise heavenly instrument.

That the atheism—or at least the pantheism of Shelley, was a mental unsoundness of a constitutional and hereditary kind, does not, we think, admit of a doubt. In these days of irresponsible faultiness, studded over with dipso- and klepto-maniacs, when so many are anxious to prove that we are "villains by necessity," as Shakespeare would have put it, "fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance," we have often wondered that some charitable doctrinaire with a scientific turn of mind has never started his athcomaniac. If the world could be convinced-and there is no lack of plausible argument to prove it-that

the different degrees of unbelief are frequently no more than the varied phases of mental disorder, and that absolute atheism itself, in the vast majority of cases, is only an irresponsible mania, proceeding from sheer intellectual defect, if we could only have it settled that our sceptics, and more especially our cultured and scientific sceptics, are what they are by a divine thrusting on," they might possibly be taught to hold their views with a little more humbleness of mind than they have hitherto done. In Shelley's case, atheism was a thing that ran in the blood. His father seems to have had a fame for eccentricity in the direction of profanity, and was said to have been a disciple of the Chesterfield and Rochefoucauldean school; while Shelley himself declares-in an unpublished letter quoted by Mr Rosetti-that his grandfather, old Sir Bysshe, "was a complete atheist, and founded all his hopes on annihilation.”

To a somewhat similar causethe want of any deep-rooted conviction in the author's mind-may be attributed, we think, a great deal of that watery and Werthery instability that characterises too many of Goethe's heroes, although in his case in a more modified degree. Goethe's unbelief did not kick at heaven as Shelley's did in the Prometheus. His scepticism was of a milder and more passive type, or perhaps it might be more accurately described as a kind of moral juste milieu, with a singular inaccessibility to attraction on one side or the other. His moral sense was insulated, so to speak-encased by a coating of intellect which was an absolute non-conductor. There is no better representative than he of the spirit described by Tennyson as

"Holding no form of creed, But contemplating all." With less of this power to main

tain an attitude of moral neutrality, Goethe's own character, as well as that of many of those he created, would have been much more humanly and poetically complete. His shortcoming in the direction of personal faith cannot be kept down, and is continually croping out in his heroes. In many of the leading men he has drawn there is hardly any strong moral aspiration, and in some no discoverable preference or predilection whatever. The only exception to this we can think of is in the character of "Goetz von Berlichingen," and that was a production almost of the author's boyhood, or at least at an age before men have begun to question or doubt. There was evidently a lurking suspicion in Goethe's maturer mind that anything like welldefined religious views in a man argued weakness, and weakness was the one vice Goethe abhorred, even to a weakness. But that he was equally well convinced, on the other hand, that no feminine character could possibly be complete without such views, may be as safely inferred. His women are singularly rich by the very excess of those qualities of faith and trust so conspicuously awanting in his men.

This absence of any kind of moral partiality in the author found its counterpart in the moral tenuity and aimless vacillation of Werther, Egmont, Wilhelm Meister, and Faust. Beside the intense purpose of Shakespeare's heroes, such men as these are little better than shadows. Even in the presence of Shakespeare's secondary characters -of his villains even-we are never altogether out of an atmosphere of faith. Among the very worst there is an implied recognition of God, a power without and beyond them, in an accusing if not approving conscience.

Without any of that modern

moral attitudinising that pirouettes on a pivot of its own self-consciousness (and which the world could so well do without), no man's work carries upon it more clearly and unmistakably the marks of an overruling conviction and a dominant purpose. So evident is this quality in Shakespeare's works that one might almost imagine that-like every fresh effort of Haydn's genius

they were commenced with prayer and carried out under the power of old Herbert's motto-

"Think the king sees thee still, for his King does."

Perhaps the most striking illustration in more modern times of the manner in which the poetical faculty may be overridden and paralysed by the action of doubt, is to be found in the life and writings of Arthur Hugh Clough. The more his life is studied, the more it appears to rise above the common conventionality of doubt, and to represent the highest possible phase of conscientious scepticism-one, indeed, of those sacrificial souls which the Creator seems to throw from Him at intervals into the ocean of religious opinion to keep the waters in a healthy fermentation, and save them from stagnating by tradition, or freezing by convention into mere lifeless forms. His case presents many unique and interesting points. Differing from Shelley, inasmuch as the very elements left out in Shelley's half-human composition were amongst Clough's most conspicuous endowments, the social side of genius-its simple homeliness, and the keenness of its human sympathies-was in him beautifully complete. Differing, again, from the scepticism of Goethe-for Clough's moral predilections were strong, and anything like indifference was with him impossible-his scepticism seemed rather to rise out of an al

most morbid over-keenness and oversensitiveness to the requirements of conscience. With a strong and perpetual craving for some solid ground of belief, he would yet have no part of his faith at second hand. Following Clough's career from his school-days at Rugby onwards, it is a melancholy and even a humiliat ing thing to find how much even of the unseen and spiritual force of a great man's mind is overruled by the irresponsible circumstance of its earthly surroundings. With all its unquestionable excellences, there was a fatal flaw in the Rugby training under the Arnold régime. In many cases-and these cases necessarily the most important-it had a tendency to over-stimulate the moral sense. It sent boys out into the world with a dangerously premature moral equipment; an education that yielded a good deal of dogmatic brain-force, but at the sacrifice of intellectual accuracy and the finer moral discriminations. An old head upon young shoulders is a doubtful blessing in any case; but when it takes the special form of an adult faith grafted on a spiritual anatomy whose bones are set not yet, there is no doubt in the matter. With the great majority of strong natures, it is simply the best conceivable arrangement for ultimate moral shipwreck. Not the most carefully administered education, accompanied by the utmost solicitude of parents, can ever take that highest part of every man's education out of the hands of his Maker. Father or mother or teacher may in some measure mould the outward frame, but God alone can breathe into its nostrils the breath of life, and make such an education a living thing. Clough (who by the inherent tendency of his nature would have been a seeker after God, had he had no higher advantages than a heathen)

has always seemed to us to have been the victim of a premature moral development. He came from Rugby with the Arnold mint-marks fresh and strong upon him, with his mind fully made up, and an amiable determination to do battle, if need be, for all the theories of his worthy master. But man proposes, God disposes. A moral influence was lying in wait for him that he had never taken into account, and which proved to be the turning-point of his life. When he went into residence at Oxford in 1836, the Tractarian movement was at its height. Newman was stretching out, through pulpit and platform, through verse and prose, those subtle prehensile tentacles of his, that touched so softly, and yet have closed so firmly, upon modern thought. It was an atmosphere Clough had never breathed before, and it proved too much for his tender years. Speaking of it afterwards, he says that for a long time he was "like a straw drawn up the draught of a chimney."

The fierce struggle he passed through can never be altogether known, and is only shadowed here and there in his poems, and a few chance exclamations in his correspondence; but of the severity of it there can be no doubt. His mind was not altogether unhorsed-he had too firm a seat for that—but he may be said to have lost his stirrups, and never again to have recovered them until the harrowing interregnum that dates between doubt and well-assured belief had done its work upon him, and worn him down to the brink of the grave. Torture like his turns the confident cant of your easy-minded believer into something that almost approaches blasphemy.

All that he suffered in that pitiless purgatory will never be revealed that valley of the shadow of