That which chiefly distinguishes Shelley from other writers is the unequalled exuberance of his fancy. The reader, say for instance of that fantastically brilliant poem, _The Witch of Atlas_, the work of three days, is overwhelmed in a storm, as it were, of rainbow snow-flakes and many-coloured lightnings, accompanied ever by “a low melodious thunder.” The evidences of pure imagination in his writings are unfrequent as compared with those of fancy: there are not half the instances of the direct embodiment of idea in form, that there are of the presentation of strange resemblances between external things. One of the finest short specimens of Shelley’s peculiar mode is his _Ode to the West Wind_, full of mysterious melody of thought and sound. But of all his poems, the most popular, and deservedly so, is the _Skylark_. Perhaps the _Cloud_ may contest it with the _Skylark_ in regard to popular favour; but the _Cloud_, although full of beautiful words and fantastic cloud-like images, is, after all, principally a work of the fancy; while the _Skylark_, though even in it fancy predominates over imagination in the visual images, forms, as a whole, a lovely, true, individual work of art; a _lyric_ not unworthy of the _lark_, which Mason apostrophizes as “sweet feathered lyric.” The strain of sadness which pervades it is only enough to make the song of the lark human. In _The Sensitive Plant_, a poem full of the peculiarities of his genius, tending through a wilderness of fanciful beauties to a thicket of mystical speculation, one curious idiosyncrasy is more prominent than in any other--curious, as belonging to the poet of beauty and loveliness: it is the tendency to be fascinated by what is ugly and revolting, so that he cannot withdraw his thoughts from it till he has described it in language, powerful, it is true, and poetic, when considered as to its fitness for the desired end, but, in force of these very excellences in the means, nearly as revolting as the objects themselves. Associated with this is the tendency to discover strangely unpleasant likenesses between things; which likenesses he is not content with seeing, but seems compelled, perhaps in order to get rid of them himself, to force upon the observation of his reader. But the admirer of Shelley is not pleased to find that one or two passages of this nature have been omitted in some editions of his works.