One of the finest short specimens of Shelley's peculiar mode is his _Ode
to the West Wind_, full of mysterious melody of thought and sound. But
of all his poems, the most popular, and deservedly so, is the _Skylark_.
Perhaps the _Cloud_ may contest it with the _Skylark_ in regard to
popular favour; but the _Cloud_, although full of beautiful words and
fantastic cloud-like images, is, after all, principally a work of the
fancy; while the _Skylark_, though even in it fancy predominates over
imagination in the visual images, forms, as a whole, a lovely, true,
individual work of art; a _lyric_ not unworthy of the _lark_, which
Mason apostrophizes as "sweet feathered lyric." The strain of sadness
which pervades it is only enough to make the song of the lark human.
In _The Sensitive Plant_, a poem full of the peculiarities of his
genius, tending through a wilderness of fanciful beauties to a thicket
of mystical speculation, one curious idiosyncrasy is more prominent than
in any other--curious, as belonging to the poet of beauty and
loveliness: it is the tendency to be fascinated by what is ugly and
revolting, so that he cannot withdraw his thoughts from it till he has
described it in language, powerful, it is true, and poetic, when
considered as to its fitness for the desired end, but, in force of these
very excellences in the means, nearly as revolting as the objects
themselves.
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