at Alexandria, in Rome-or even in fairyland, or that equally fabulous Bohemia, "a desert country by the sea." In that same play, too, our reason is asked to make an imaginative bound—not merely into the extra six hours that a French tragedian in despair added on to the regulation number of twenty-four -but over fifteen years; while in the second part of "Faust" we are transported suddenly from the Trojan period to the middle ages! I must confess that in most modern plays, when the bill requests one to imagine that some considerable period has elapsed before the curtain again rises, my imagination utterly fails, stumbles, and falls headlong into the yawning abyss. But in the "Winter's Tale "and in "Faust" it is not so. The poet's imagination has bridged the chasm for one. There is consistency and unity in it all we step securely across the light but firm bridge that he has arched across the gulf.

So much for the effects of the new spirit on the form of the drama.

But the new questions of life and all its mysteries, the solution of which we, impatient of idealized form, so eagerly crave for, are scarcely touched by Shakespeare. He paints men as they lived, as they felt. As to their inner and future existence, as to that final goal to which all things are tending, I do not say that these matters did not affect him as a man, but he does not introduce them into that picture of human nature which his plays reflect. "He traces," says a writer, "the work

ings of noble or lovely human character to the point, and no further, where they disappear into the darkness of death, and ends with a look back, never on towards anything beyond." You remember Hamlet's dying words: "The rest is silence."

In conclusion, I shall ask you to look at still more modern times.

Perhaps the very highest and fullest expression of the modern spirit is to be found in the works of a poet who, though he did not formally accept—even openly rejected—the extraordinarily gross dogmatic religion of his day, nevertheless gives the most ethereal and musical expression to the upward soaring tendency of the modern spirit—that tendency that we see also in our spires and pinnacles of Gothic architecture. In his own words, addressed to the lark, we can most justly address him :

"Higher still and higher

:

From the earth thou springest;
Like a cloud of fire

The blue deep thou wingest

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest."

As a contrast to the Greek Prometheus, whom we saw grandly defiant, bound fast to the solitary rock, take Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound." The very title is significant "Unbound." Here is at once movement, unrestraint-everything the reverse of the statuesque.*

*

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Eschylus also wrote a 'Prometheus Unbound," which is not extant. How different it must have been from Shelley's drama is proved from the fact that it treated of the reconciliation of Prometheus to Zeus.

If I am not greatly mistaken, the "Prometheus Unbound" is the most magnificent mystical creation that a poet's imagination has ever conceived.

It announces the downfall of all gross forms of godhead and despotism. Jupiter, or Zeus, disappears down the fathomless abyss, overthrown by the frown of Eternity :

Dizzily down-ever, for ever, down."

Earth, too, the form of material nature, confesses

the supremacy of the mind of man :—

"The lightning is his slave: heaven's utmost deep

Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep

They pass before his eye, are numbered and roll on :
The tempest is his steed: he strides the air,

And the abyss shouts, from her depth laid bare,

'Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me: I have none.'" What, then, shall endure, when all the foundations of the earth are shaken ? What is it on which the poet relies, when all mere forms have passed away? Listen :

"Love, from its awful throne of patient power,

And narrow verge of craglike agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength."

And the poem ends with these lines:

"To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;

To defy Power that seems omnipotent;
To love and bear; to hope, till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates ;
Neither to change, nor flatter, nor repent ;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone life, joy, empire, and victory."

It is the triumph of the infinite over the finite : the song of one who has gazed on a vision of eternal truth, and whose every word vibrates with the emotion which that vision has excited in him. In this-the vision-I cannot help thinking that Shelley is the greatest of all modern poets. But in poetic faculty, in the power of artistically representing this vision, of revealing this the great secret of Nature, he is, I will not say deficient, but supremely great only in one special sphere. When I called his poetry a song, and when I said that his words vibrated with emotion, I used two expressions peculiarly applicable to lyric poetry. As its very name will tell, lyric poetry must be in its form and thought to the highest possible extent musical, and must be full of emotion. This very emotion is destructive of distinct form. Lyrics are, or should be, short spontaneous outbursts of feeling. Shelley is eminently a singer, a lyric poet. I do not mean to deny that in imaginative creation he is not also a great poet (for the "Prometheus Unbound" gives him a right to that title), but at the

Now,

same time I feel that the glory of the eternal vision has overpowered him, and that he is too deeply moved by it to speak of it calmly and in a generally recognizable form. His emotion is not tranquilized. Hence that want of form which repels many from his poems, to say nothing of the large class of minds that are repelled by his defiance of formal creeds. But he at least has attempted a higher theme than almost any before him-or after him. If he has partly failed in creating a new form for these new subjects, have any others succeeded better?

I shall now take one more step-it is but a short one-from Shelley to our own day.

In our time, at the present moment in England, to say nothing of other countries, there exists, as there always will exist in a greater or less degree, an intense craving after truth, after certainty. Of those to whom belief (whether formalized or not) affords the peace of certainty I do not presume to speak; nor even of those who find what they deem peace in the mere acceptance of religious forms. Of the rest many, as in Athens of old, seek truth in the sophistry of a subtle philosophy; others, despairing of certainty in things unseen, cling passionately to life and its pleasures, or to science and its certainties, devoting themselves to the only reality that they recognize, and wallowing often in gross materialism and sensuality; many again, a vast multitude, like that which Dante describes in his "Inferno," circle restlessly round and