Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/188

176 also called Boanerges; and in the hands of a Master whose wisdom and tact were consummate, John doubtless did peerless service. Shelley was unlucky enough never to meet a master. Those he took for such were men like Godwin, and, in a measure, Byron—the one a vagabond charlatan, the other a mere superb Hau-Degen, as the Germans say, a glorified swashbuckler on the right side. Shelley was forced to stand by himself, forced to attempt all alone the feat of 'scaling the Alps,' in the picturesque phrase of Carlyle, who opined that the would-be climber's general existence must have been 'haggard.' Carlyle was mistaken. Sometimes it was, but often it was not, and sometimes it was happy beyond words. Shelley, in his Italian woods, on his Italian rivers and shores, is the one revelation of pure, unconscious, lyric happiness granted us from the life of his contemporaries.

As in every case, his strength and his weakness went hand in hand. That acute sensitiveness of his made him susceptible to the whisper of 'the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come' to an extent that was remarkable for its discoveries and its errors. Wordsworth, in his heavy way, Coleridge, in his effusive way, had been excited in their youth by the 'bliss' of the revolutionary dawn in France. Wordsworth was hopelessly doomed