Hester, as she spoke the last words, rushed into Julie's arms. The two fond girls had often embraced before, but never with the feelings they experienced now. The newly-discovered tie between them awoke their most impassioned, their holiest sympathies. Love was speaking in their tears, and breathing in their sighs. Two sisters had they been, living. together, serving each other, yet all the while knowing nothing of their relationship. And there they embraced and wept, drew back and embraced again ; while Mr. Somerset, leaning over them, was unable to give utterance to the emotions that melted his heart; his poverty, his ruin, his imprisonment, were that moment unfelt and forgotten.
"Alastor" was too distinguished a poet, and too remarkable a man, not to have ensured a welcome, carte blanche, for any remains of his, whether prose or verse. The five-and-twenty letters before us, however, now introduced to the public under the auspices of Mr. Browning, constitute no particular novelty, nor do they reveal the writer in any other aspect than that with which we are already familiar. They are to be regarded as supplementary to the existing collection, and as such have a definite value in the eyes of all who admire graceful, thoughtful, and manly specimens of epistolary art—an art wherein Shelley has long since established his fame as an "approved good master." Mr. Browning's preface is eloquent, but somewhat obscure; as in "Sordello," there are thoughts that come like shadows, so depart, and fancies that, in tricksy mood, trip one another up, or seem to do so to confused spectators. It discourses upon the relative value of the biographies of objective and of subjective poets, showing the superior importance of the latter. The objective poet's biography may be fraught with instruction and interest, but it can be dispensed with, according to Mr. Browning's point of view; whereas, in the case of the subjective poet, who does not paint pictures and hang them on the walls, but rather carries them on the retina of his own eyes, we must look deep into those very eyes to see those pictures upon them. His work is an "effluence," and "that effluence cannot be easily considered in abstraction from his personality—being indeed the very radiance and aroma of his personality, projected from it, but not separated." To scan the poetry we must consult the poet, and learn what manner of man he was, and assume as nearly as possible his own stand-point, and scrutinise the objects of his apocalypse from the same focus. "We may learn from the biography whether his spirit invariably saw and spoke from the last height to which it had attained." Nevertheless, Mr. Browning recognises in Shelley's subjectivity, the whole personality of the poet shining forward from the poems, without much need of going further to seek it. Shelley's "spheric poetical faculty," as its own "self-sufficing central light," may be seen "radiating equally through immaturity and accomplishment, through many fragments and occasional completion," so that a competent judgment needs not such superfluities as letters, anecdotes, and mémoires
- ↑ Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with an Introductory Essay. By Robert Browning. London: Moxon.
