Note 14 — III. MAURICE DE GUÉRIN.

Compare, for example, his “Lines Written in the Euganean Hills,” with Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” (Golden Treasury, pp. 256, 284). The latter piece renders Nature; the former tries to render her. I will not deny, however, that Shelley has natural magic in his rhythm; what I deny is, that he has it in his language. It always seems to me that the right sphere for Shelley’s genius was the sphere of music, not of poetry; the medium of sounds he can master, but to master the more difficult medium of words he has neither intellectual force enough nor sanity enough.