This brings us as near, I imagine, to the idea of THE SENSITIVE PLANT as we are likely to find ourselves in any other most Shelleyan region of his poetry. The lines recur persistently to the mind in reading the later poem; and almost as suggestively is it haunted by one passage at least in the “Defence,” which speaks with a sort of aerial eloquence of a Poetry whose art it is to arrest “the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide.” When one considers the rarity and the half-impalpable conditions of this chosen realm of his poetry, and turns to THE SENSITIVE PLANT as one of its most essential expressions, one is at first rendered half-incredulous of the power of a kindred art to interpret effectively such a poem. But, in fact, there is a much more concrete imagery—whether of flowers or weeds, directly presented or definitely symbolised; or of the Lady who haunts among them—than one at all remembers until one takes to conning its stanzas closely with an eye to such effects. THE SENSITIVE PLANT lends itself more readily to the art of the symbolist, in particular, than any other of Shelley’s poems. It would be quite possible for a critic with a turn for metaphysics, and a certain German patience of analytic ingenuity, to read into its exquisite fable of mortality a whole world of significance, which the poet himself had never suspected. But the symbolic artist, if he be too, as needs be, a symbolic poet, is saved by his art. The spirit of the poem is likely to obsess him, and compel from him only such an interpretation as is, allowing for the casual differences of kindred arts and sympathetic temperaments, truly and finely accordant with its own essential qualities and terms of expression. The true poets have that power of continuing to enlarge the original issues and influences of their song long after its immediate effect has died away. Shelley commands with a more than usual lyric enchantment a sphere that, like the magic house of Merlin, can go on enlarging itself; until one figures him, not as the sad spirit of the garden in this poem, but as the radiant spirit of his “Hymn of Apollo”: “_All harmony of instrument or verse,_ _All prophecy, all medicine are mine,_ _All light of art or nature—to my song_ _Victory and praise in their own right belong._” ERNEST RHYS. A NOTE UPON THE ILLUSTRATIONS In one sense a beautiful poem can never be illustrated: being beautiful it is already perfect, and, to intelligent minds, illustrates itself. Everything that it says it says in the best possible way; within the limits of the medium chosen, it is absolute.