Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/408

 One aspect of this newly roused individualism is to be seen in Byron and his imitators throughout Europe—an aspect which unites all the self-importance of a feudal seigneur with a real or affected despair of human happiness such as monastic asceticism alone can rival. Another aspect of it may be seen in Shelley's substitute of spiritual pantheism for individual immortality. In Shelley, personality knows its own weakness in the face of the physical world, knows its weakness as but one drop in the vast flood of humanity, and is willing to come down from feudal isolation, to mix in the democratic crowds, to merge itself in that spirit of Nature which knows neither personal nor social distinctions—

But this negation of self, expressing itself in abstractions as intensely realised as they are delicately beautiful, makes Shelley's sentiment of Nature less profound than that of Wordsworth. Neither in the presence of his fellow-men, whatever their myriad march, nor of Nature, how countless soever her worlds, can the indestructible personality of Wordsworth forget itself. His spirit, like that of Shelley, is divine; but it is no mere fragment of a vast divinity; backwards into the illimitable past, forwards into the illimitable future, now and for ever in the face of man and Nature, it dwells, has dwelt, shall dwell like a star apart in an individuality unmade, unmakable, unchangeable. Before this profound sense of personality, partially Platonic, partially Christian, but most of all awakened by the physical and social conditions of the poet's age, Nature assumes a depth of meaning which only beings of Wordsworthian mould may feel. Byron's descriptive powers, Shelley's musical communion with the sounds of