And to such vile newspaper prose he not only added the ghastly adornment of verse, but also frequently enlivened it with the “poetic licences” and Parnassian “lingo” of the Pope period. What a contrast with Shelley! He erred quite as much as Crabbe did from the imaginative reality which is the true ideal; but it was all in the opposite way. If Crabbe’s eye, in its love for the actual and concrete, dwelt too habitually upon the hardness and ugliness of the earth on which he trod, Shelley’s thoughts and perceptions were for the most part Pinnacled dim in the intense inane of a fancy which had no foundation in earth or heaven. His poetry has, however, the immortal reality of music; and his songs _are_ songs, though they may be often called “songs without words,” the words meaning so little though they sound so sweet. This “parallel”--as lines starting and continued in opposite directions have got to be called--might be carried much further with advantage to the student of poetry; and the comparison might be still more profitable if the best poems of Coleridge were examined as illustrations of the true poetic reality from which Crabbe and Shelley diverge equally, but in contrary ways. Crabbe mistakes actuality for reality; Shelley’s imagination is unreal. Coleridge, when he is himself, whether he is in the region of actuality, as in “Genevieve,” or in that of imagination, as in “Christabel,” is always both real and ideal in the only true poetic sense, in which reality and ideality are truly one. In each of these poems, as in every work of true art, there is a living idea which expresses itself in every part, while the complete work remains its briefest possible expression, so that it is as absurd to ask What is its idea? as it would be to ask what is the idea of a man or of an oak. This idea cannot be a simple negation; and simple evil--which is so often Crabbe’s theme--is simple negation. On the other hand, good, in order to be the ground of the ideal in art, must be intelligible--that is to say, imaginatively credible, though it may want the conditions of present actuality. But is there any such ideal as this in Shelley? XXI SHALL SMITH HAVE A STATUE?