ley, in melody and exuberance of fancy, was incalculably superior to Wordsworth? But mark their inferences.
Shelley.
| “Teach me half the gladness |
| That thy brain must know, |
| Such harmonious madness |
| From my lips would flow |
| The world should listen, then, as I am listening now.” |
Wordsworth.
| “What though my course be rugged and uneven, |
| “To prickly moors and dusty ways confined, |
| “Yet, hearing thee and others of thy kind |
| “As full of gladness and as free of heaven, |
| “I o'er the earth will go plodding on |
| By myself, cheerfully, till the day is done.” |
If Wordsworth have superiority then, it consists in greater maturity and dignity of sentiment.
While reading Shelley, we must surrender ourselves without reserve to the magnetic power of genius; we must not expect to be satisfied, but rest content with being stimulated. We alone who can resign his soul in unquestioning simplicity to the descant of the nightingale or the absorption of the sea-side, may hope to receive from the mind of a Shelley the suggestions which, to those who know how to receive, he can so liberally impart.
I cannot leave Shelley without quoting two or three stanzas, in which he speaks of himself, and which are full of his peculiar beauties and peculiar faults.
| “A frail form, |
| A phantom among men, companionless, |
| As the last cloud of an expiring storm, |
| Whose thunder is its knell, he, as I guess, |
| Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness |
| Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray |
