wrote in answer to a criticism, that his mission is "to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling," and "to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole." He does not see that he has failed of both aims, partly because 'The Revolt' is too abstract, partly because it is too definite. It is neither one thing nor the other. The feelings apprehended are, indeed, remote enough; in many descriptions where land, sea, and mountain shimmer through a gorgeous mist that never was of this earth, the "material universe" may perhaps be admitted to be grasped as a whole; and he has embodied his conception of the "moral universe" in a picture of all the good impulses of the human heart, that should be so fruitful, poisoned by the pressure of religious and political authority. It was natural that the method which he chose should be that of the romantic narrative--we have noticed how he began by trying to write novels--nor is that method essentially unfitted to represent the conflict between good and evil, with the whole universe for a stage; instances of great novels that are epics in this sense will occur to every one. But realism is required, and Shelley was constitutionally incapable of realism The personages of the story, Laon and the Hermit, the Tyrant and Cythna, are pale projections of Shelley himself; of Dr. Lind, an enlightened old gentleman with whom he made friends at Eton; of His Majesty's Government; and of Mary Wollstonecraft, his wife's illustrious mother. They are neither of the world nor out of it, and consequently, in so far as they are localised and incarnate and their actions woven into a tale, 'The Revolt of Islam' is a failure. In his next great poem he was to pursue precisely the same aims, but with more success, because he had now hit upon a figure of more appropriate vagueness and sublimity. The scheme of 'Prometheus Unbound' (1819) is drawn from the immortal creations of Greek tragedy.