Out of the Venetian welter came, too, the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_ and the opening parts of _Don Juan_. The mocking, rollicking, marvellous _Vision of Judgment_, whose daring license staggered even Murray and Moore, and which scarified poor Southey, belongs to a later phase of his Italian career. It is angry and bitter--and has an impish laughter in it--of a sort which our friend Robert Ingersoll might write, if his genius ran to poetry. _Cain_ had been of a bolder tone--perhaps loftier; with much of the argument that Milton puts into the mouth of Satan, amplified and rounded, and the whole illuminated by passages of wonderful poetic beauty. His scepticism, if not so out-spoken and full of plump negatives as that of Shelley, is far more mocking and bitter. If Shelley was rich in negations--so far as relates to orthodox belief--he was also rich in dim, shadowy conceptions of a mysterious eternal region, with faith and love reigning in it--toward which in his highest range of poetic effusion he makes approaches with an awed and a tremulous step. But with Byron--even where his words carry full theistic beliefs--the awe and the tremulous approaches are wanting. _Shelley Again._ Shelley went back from Switzerland to a home for a year or more, beyond Windsor, near to Bisham--amid some of the loveliest country that borders upon the Thames. Here he wrote that strange poem of _Laon and Cythna_ (or _Revolt of Islam_, as it was called on its re-issue), which, so far as one can gather meaning from its redundant and cumulated billows of rich, poetic language, tells how a nation was kindled to freedom by the strenuous outcry of some young poet-prophet--how he seems to win, and his enemies become like smoking flax--how the dreadful fates that beset us, and crowd all worldly courses from their best outcome, did at last trample him down; not him only, but the one dearest to him--who is a willing victim--and bears him off into the shades of night. Throughout, Laon the Victim is the poet’s very self; and the very self appears again--with what seems to the cautious, world-wise reader a curious indiscretion--in the pretty jumping metre of “Rosalind and Helen”:-- “Joyous he was; and hope and peace On all who heard him did abide, Raining like dew from his sweet talk, As where the evening star may walk Along the brink of the gloomy seas, Liquid mists of splendid quiver. His very gestures touched to tears The unpersuaded tyrant, never So moved before.… Men wondered, and some sneered, to see One sow what he could never reap; For he is rich, they said, and young, And might drink from the depths of luxury. If he seeks Fame, Fame never crowned The champion of a trampled creed; If he seeks Power, Power is enthroned ’Mid ancient rights and wrongs, to feed Which hungry wolves with praise and spoil, Those who would sit near Power must toil.”