Hence his sensuousness is touched with a
real spiritual quality. In his poetic emotion, as in his social ambitions,
Shelley is constantly yearning for the unattainable. One of our best
critics [Footnote: Mr. R. H. Hutton.] has observed: 'He never shows his
full power in dealing separately with intellectual or moral or physical
beauty. His appropriate sphere is swift sensibility, the intersecting line
between the sensuous and the intellectual or moral. Mere sensation is too
literal for him, mere feeling too blind and dumb, mere thought too cold....
Wordsworth is always exulting in the fulness of Nature, Shelley is always
chasing its falling stars.'
The contrast, here hinted at, between Shelley's view of Nature and that of
Wordsworth, is extreme and entirely characteristic; the same is true, also,
when we compare Shelley and Byron. Shelley's excitable sensuousness
produces in him in the presence of Nature a very different attitude from
that of Wordsworth's philosophic Christian-mysticism. For the sensuousness
of Shelley gets the upper hand of his somewhat shadowy Platonism, and he
creates out of Nature mainly an ethereal world of delicate and rapidly
shifting sights and sounds and sensations. And while he is not unresponsive
to the majestic greatness of Nature in her vast forms and vistas, he is
never impelled, like Byron, to claim with them the kinship of a haughty
elemental spirit.
A rather long passage of appreciative criticism [Footnote: Professor A.
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