Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/237

 cannot compete with it, But do they compete with it? The poem of Keats, Mr. Arnold says, "renders Nature;" the poem of Shelley "tries to render her." It is this that I deny. What Shelley tries to do he does; and he does not try to do the same thing as Keats. The comparison is as empty and profitless as one between the sonnets of Shakespeare and the sonnets of Milton. Shelley never in his life wrote a poem of that exquisite contraction and completeness, within that round and perfect limit. This poem of the Euganean Hills is no piece of spiritual sculpture or painting after the life of natural things. I do not pretend to assign it a higher or a lower place; I say simply that its place is not the same. It is a rhapsody of thought and feeling coloured by contact with nature, but not born of the contact; and such as it is all Shelley's work is, even when most vague and vast in its elemental scope of labour and of aim. A soul as great as the world lays hold on the things of the world; on all life of plants, and beasts, and men; on all likeness of time, and death, and good things and evil. His aim is rather to render the effect of a thing than a thing itself; the soul and spirit of life rather than the living form, the growth rather than the thing grown. And herein he too is unapproachable.

Other and lesser critics than Mr. Arnold have taxed Shelley with a want of dramatic power upon the characters and passions of men. While writing these notes I have come across the way of such an one, who bids us notice how superior in truth and subtlety is Mr. Browning's study of Guido Franceschini to Shelley's of