"And, when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of heaven above, With wings folded I rest on mine airy nest, As still as a brooding dove." What consciousness of power in: "From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Over a torrent sea, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof; The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch through which I march With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair, Is the million-coloured bow." Yet the real spirit of the Cloud is playfulness, the playfulness of a child. Even when the sun has swept it from the sky, it only laughs:-- "I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,-- And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise, and unbuild it again." It is not only the unlikeness to Byron's gloomy passion which strikes us in the sublime childlikeness and bounty and all-embracing love of this Cloud; there is another characteristic in this poetry, which we shall merely mention here, and devote more attention to later, namely, its antique, its absolutely primitive, spirit. We are reminded of the most ancient Aryan poetry of nature, of the Vedas, of Homer. In comparison with this, Byron is altogether modern. When the Cloud sings: "That orbèd maiden with white fire laden Whom mortals call the Moon, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor By the midnight breezes strewn! And wherever the beat of her unseen feet Which only the angels hear, May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, The Stars peep behind her and peer;" and when it speaks of "the sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes," the poet transports us, by the primitive freshness of his imagination, back to the time when the phenomena of nature in all their newness were transformed into myths. To Shelley these phenomena were ever new. He lived among them in a way which no poet had done before or has done since. By far the greater part of his short life of thirty years was spent under the open sky. The sea was his passion; he was constantly sailing; his most beautiful poems were written while he lay in his boat with the sun beating on him, browning his soulful face and delicate hands. It was a passion that was the pleasure of his life and the cause of his death. Everything that had to do with boats and sailing had an attraction for him. He had a childlike hobby for floating paper boats; it is said that on one occasion, having no other paper at hand, he launched a £50 bank-note on the pond in Kensington Gardens.