Blank verse is a test of poets in this respect, and Shelley's blank verse is limp and characterless. Those triumphs, again, which consist in the beauty of complicated wholes, were never his. He is supreme, indeed, in simple outbursts where there is no question of form, but in efforts of longer breath, where architecture is required, he too often sprawls and fumbles before the inspiration comes. Yet his verse has merits which seem to make such criticisms vain. We may trace in it all kinds of 'arrieres pensees', philosophical and sociological, that an artist ought not to have, and we may even dislike its dominating conception of a vague spirit that pervades the universe; but we must admit that when he wrote it was as if seized and swept away by some "unseen power" that fell upon him unpremeditated. His emotions were of that fatal violence which distinguishes so many illustrious but unhappy souls from the mass of peaceable mankind. In the early part of last century a set of illustrations to Faust by Retzch used to be greatly admired; about one of them, a picture of Faust and Margaret in the arbour, Shelley says in a letter to a friend: "The artist makes one envy his happiness that he can sketch such things with calmness, which I only dared look upon once, and which made my brain swim round only to touch the leaf on the opposite side of which I knew that it was figured." So slight were the occasions that could affect him even to vertigo. When, from whatever cause, the frenzy took him, he would write hastily, leaving gaps, not caring about the sense. Afterwards he would work conscientiously over what he had written, but there was nothing left for him to do but to correct in cold blood, make plain the meaning, and reduce all to such order as he could. One result of this method was that his verse preserved an unparallelled rush and spontaneity, which is perhaps as great a quality as anything attained by the more bee-like toil of better artists. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The literature dealing with Shelley's work and life is immense, and no attempt will be made even to summarise it here. A convenient one-volume edition of the poems is that edited by Professor Edward Dowden for Messrs. Macmillan (1896); it includes Mary Shelley's valuable notes. There is a good selection of the poems in the "Golden Treasury Series," compiled by A. Stopford Brooke. The Prose Works have been collected and edited by Mr. H. Buxton Forman in four volumes (1876-1880). Of the letters there is an edition by Mr. Roger Ingpen (2 vols., 1909). A number of letters to Elizabeth Hitchener were published by Mr. Bertram Dobell in 1909.