literary history, and, like nearly all works in such circumstances, it has a greatness all its own. But, beyond that, it lies in a region of art where no other English work companions it, as an epic of the romantic spirit such as Italy most boasts of, but superior in breadth, in ethical power, in human interest, to Ariosto or Tasso, and comparing with them as Pindar with the Alexandrians; it realized Hell and Eden, and the world of heavenly war and the temptation, to the vision of men, with tremendous imaginative power, stamping them into the race-mind as permanent imagery; and the literary kinship which the workmanship bears to what is most excellent and shining in the great works of Greece, Rome and Italy, as well as to Hebraic grandeur, helps to place the poem in that remoter air which is an association of the mind with all art. No other English poem has a similar brilliancy, aloofness and perfection, as of something existing in another element, except the Adonais. In it personal lyricism achieved the most impersonal of elegies, and mingled the fairest dreams of changeful imaginative grief with the soul's intellectual passion for immortality full-voiced. It is detached from time and place; the hunger of the soul for eternity, which is its substance, human nature can never lay off; its literary kinship is with what is most lovely in the idyllic melody of the antique; and, owing to its small scale and the simple unity of its mood, it gives forth the perpetual charm of literary form in great purity. These two poems stand alone with Shakespeare's plays, and are for epic and lyric what his work is for drama, the height of English performance in the cultivation of romance. Other poets must be judged to have attained excellence in romantic art in proportion as they reveal the qualities of Shakespeare, Milton and Shelley; for these three are the masters of romantic form, which, being the spirit of life proceeding from within outward, is the vital structure of English poetic genius. This internal power is also a principle of classic art in its antique examples; but academic criticism developed from them a hardened formalism to which romantic art is related as the spirit of life to the death-mask of the past. Such pallor has from time to time crossed the features of English letters in a man or an age, and has brought a marble dignity, as to Landor, or the shadow of an Augustan elegance, as in the era of Pope; but it has faded and passed away under the flush of new life. Even in prose, in which so-called classic qualities are still sought by academic taste, the genius of English has shown a native obstinacy. The novel is so Protean in form as to seem amorphous, but essentially repeats the drama, and submits in its masters to Shakespearian parallelism; in substance and manner it has been overwhelmingly of a romantic cast; and in the other forms of prose, style, though of all varieties, has, perhaps, proved