142 The Future Poetry
which prevents the perfect self-expression that we find only in
the few supreme poets.
This was due to the conditions under which the evolution of
his poetry had to take place and to the early death which found
him at the time when it was rounding towards the full orb of
its maturity. His earlier poetry shows him striving with the diffi-
culty of the too intellectual manner of speech from which these
poets of supra-intellectual truth had to take their departure.
Shelley uses language throughout as a poet; he was incapable
of falling into the too hard and outward manner of Byron or
yielding to the turn towards mere intellectuality which always
beset Wordsworth. The grain of his mind was too saturated with
the hues of poetic vision, he had too splendid and opulent an
imagination, too great a gift of flowing and yet uplifted and in-
spired speech for such descents, and even in his earlier immature
poetry,Queen Mab,Alastor,TheRevoltofIslam, these powers
are there and sustain him, but still the first form of his diction is
a high, sometimes a magnificent poetic eloquence, which some-
times enforces the effect of what he has to say, but more often
loses it in a flood of diffuse and overabundant expression. It is
not yet the native language of his spirit. As his power develops,
the eloquence remains, but is subdued to the growing splendour
of his vision and its hints and images, but the thought seems
almost to disappear from the concrete grasp of the intelligence
into a wonder of light and a music of marvellous sound. The
PrometheusandEpipsychidionshow this turn of his genius at
its height; they are two of the three greatest things he has left
to us on the larger scale. Here he does come near to something
like the natural speech of his strange, beautiful and ethereal
spirit; but the one thing that is wanting is a more ascetic force
oftapasya ̄ economising and compressing its powers to bring
in a new full and seizing expression of the thought element in
his poetry, not merely opulent and eloquent or bright with the
rainbow hues of imagination, but sovereign in poetic perfection
and mastery. Towards this need his later style is turning, but
except once inAdonaishe does not seize on the right subject
matter for his genius. Only in the lyric of which he has always