Santayana teaching the young men of the world. Yet Mr. Santayana says that Shelley was "unteachable"! Shelley believed that a man would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong in his poetry. Yet every man, poet or not, who writes at all and is not a hypocrite, embodies his conceptions of right and wrong in all his utterances. Shelley was intensely personal in his poetry. His sky-larking, star-sweeping way of expressing himself takes us out of range of his individual opinions. He spoke heart-near things in splendid distances and tried to pull the far skies down into sodden British hearts. The revolt, the defeated revolt of his own times, near to him as the news of the daily papers, he allegorized as the rebellion of a mythological Islam, and he flung the stars reeling through Spenserian stanzas. No essayist has risen fully to Shelley's poetic stature and comprehended him except another great poet, Francis Thompson. Speaking his own convictions, as every man, poet, critic, or even an academic voice of reason must and should speak his convictions, Thompson begins his essay by pleading for a reunion between his church and the art of poetry. So much of his essay seems to me interesting but not closely relevant to Shelley. After this introduction Thompson soars into the greatest essay that has ever been written on an English poet by an English poet. Most poets, with their wonderful ears, of course write good prose. Francis Thompson has a fine essay on the prose of poets. Even Browning, who wrote little prose except the extraordinary parenthetical letters, was so clarified by Shelley that in his essay he discovered a fairly fluent and readable style. Shelley is primarily neither philosopher nor revolutionist, but lyric poet. Yet to treat him only as a lyric poet is to forget his great drama, "The Cenci," which can hold up its head undiminished beside the Elizabethans. That idiotic British officialdom does not, or did not at last accounts, allow its performance on the regular stage, is perhaps only one more proof of how little impression Shelley's austere anarchism made on practical British morality. "The Cenci" is austere; for Shelley, it is athletically economical. The last speech of Beatrice is an unexcelled emotional climax. Yet even in this play we find that "intensely personal" note of Shelley; it speaks all his heart against all injustice. The play learned many lessons from the Elizabethans. It is not far wrong to call these lines Shakespearean: My wife and children sleep; They are now living in unmeaning dreams; But I must wake, still doubting if that deed Be just which was most necessary. O, Thou replenished lamp! whose narrow fire Is shaken by the wind and on whose edge Devouring darkness hovers! H. G. WELLS AND UTOPIA