thought that all efforts of the past for the good of mankind have been turned to evil; but spirits of heroic action, selfsacrifice, wisdom, imagination, and love comfort him. In the fullness of time Demagorgon (Necessity) hurls tyranny from the throne. Asia, who represents the spirit of love in nature, is united to Prometheus, the spirit of man, and the golden age begins. The last act is a series of lyrics, celebrating the age of perfect justice and peace. The poem shows Shelley's hatred of tyranny, and his sublime faith in a perfected humanity ruled everywhere by love. Its weakness is that it gives no light on how the result is to be brought about. His Shelley not a Constructive Thinker. Indeed Shelley was not a constructive thinker; he was a lyric poet. sense of fact was not strong. He deals less with the practical actualities of life than any of his contemporaries. He was an uncompromising idealist, with a sublime faith in the future of mankind; but the visions which his faith pictured were unaccompanied by serious thought of how those visions were to be realized. However, the wealth of his imagination and the rich music of his verse gave his ideas enduring artistic form. "Adonais." - His poetry is of the elusive, etherial quality almost baffling to the commonplace mind. Even his nature imagery has to do with evanescent forms, the wind, the cloud, the voice of the unseen nightingale or skylark. This air of unreality is well illustrated in Adonais, his elegy on the death of John Keats. Those who come to weep over the bier are Urania (Heavenly Love), Splendors, Glooms, Hours, Destinies, and even the lovely Dreams which have emanated from the poet's brain in life. Shelley has been well called the poet's poet. The Poetry of Scott. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) represents primarily the influence of the old ballads and romances. From a child, he was familiar with all the legendary lore of the Scotch, and later published a large collection of old border ballads under the name, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. His first original productions were metrical romances, the meter being suggested by Coleridge's Christabel. The best are The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) a tale of Scottish border life in the Middle Ages, Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810), a story of the Scottish highlands at the time of James V of Scotland. Of these, Marmion is the most swift and powerful; The Lady of the Lake, the richest and most charming. These poems made Scott for a time the most popular literary man in the British Islands, and the Scott country still remains one of the most popular of literary pilgrimages. Qualities of his Poetry. His poetry was not so deeply imaginative, not so artistically finished, as the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Scott was interested primarily in the pageantry of life. His romantic scenery is picturesque, his characters bold and wholesome, his story spirited and borne along on a rapid and buoyant verse. There is much brilliant declamation. Byron's Romanticism. After the triumph of The Lady of the Lake, Scott's fame as a poet began to decline, his place in the popular favor being taken by Lord Byron (1788-1824). Byron's early poetry shows the influence of classicism. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, for instance, is written in rimed couplets and in the manner of eighteenth-century satire. But he soon developed marked romantic tendencies. His tales of Oriental life, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, etc., are lurid and extravagant. Childe Harold is a story of travel, written in Spenserian stanzas, and recounting journeys in Portugal, Spain, Illyria, Greece, Turkey, the Rhine Country, and Italy. It is full of brilliant description, enriched by literary and historical allusions. Its mood is somber, passionate, rebellious. Harold, the protagonist, is a typical romantic figure, fleeing from the real world to find solace in solitude. Byron a Poet of Revolution. Byron was the prince of radicals and revolutionists. He became for all Europe the prophet of liberty, voicing better than any one else the revolutionary feeling which smoldered everywhere after the failure of the French Revolution. Less of a doctrinaire than Shelley, he yet had a supreme contempt for all manner of restraint, and a passionate love of liberty. Add to this an oratorical method free from all refinements and subtleties, and the reason for his wide popularity is explained. His dramas Manfred and Cain are characteristic revolutionary pieces. Manfred is a kind of Faust, living high up in the Alps in gloomy and bitter isolation, scornful of his fate. Cain, the first murderer, is pictured as an heroic rebel against the tyranny of God. He is one of those "Souls who dare to look the Omnipotent tyrant in His everlasting face, and tell him that His evil is not good." Byron has been called the chief example of the "Satanic School of Poetry." 66 The Prisoner of Chillon." His most finished poem is The Prisoner of Chillon, the pathetic recital of a Swiss patriot who has been released from a dungeon after years of imprisonment, having seen his two brothers, who were imprisoned with him, die in their chains, and find graves beneath the floor of the dungeon. Byron's Satires. - Byron was also a satirist, the only one of the great romantic poets to win fame in this form of art. His English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is a clever attack upon the critics and poets of his time. The Vision of Judgment is directed against the poet Southey, who had aroused Byron's ire by praising George III. Don Juan, the most famous of all, is a comprehensive satire on modern society. Byron ruthlessly exposes the social corruption hidden beneath the conventional veneer. The work is licentious but brilliant. It is, of all Byron's poems, the most complete expression of his strange personality. John Keats (1796-1821) occupies a place apart from his fellow-romanticists. He took almost no interest in the problems of his own time. His poetic inspiration came almost exclusively from the classical and medieval past. Most of his information about Greek story and mythology came out of the classical dictionary, for he could not read the Greek language; yet somehow he gained a sympathetic appreciation of the Greek spirit. At the same time, he knew and loved medieval romance with all its imaginative luxuriance. The combination of the classical and the romantic in his nature made him unique in his time. Endymion is a classical theme treated with romantic extravagance. Lamia, too, is rich in romantic coloring. Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes are medieval themes. The Eve of St. Agnes has been called an "unsurpassed example of the pure charm of colored and romantic narrative in English verse." Hyperion shows the Miltonic influence; it is an example of the grand style in poetry." His great odes, especially the Ode on a Grecian Urn and the Ode to a Nightingale, have rare beauty and finish. Indeed, Keats worshiped beauty. His poetic creed is expressed at the end of the Ode on a Grecian Urn: 66 "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, this is all |