guide.  The great of all ages are arraigned, and the spirit of the world is brought before us, while its heroes pass, unveil their faces for a moment, and are swallowed in the throng that has no ending.  But how Shelley meant to solve the problems he has raised, by what sublime philosophy he purposed to resolve the discords of this revelation more soul-shattering than Daniel’s “Mene”, we cannot even guess.  The poem, as we have it, breaks abruptly with these words:  “Then what is Life?  I cried”—­a sentence of the profoundest import, when we remember that the questioner was now about to seek its answer in the halls of Death.

To separate any single passage from a poem which owes so much of its splendour to the continuity of music and the succession of visionary images, does it cruel wrong.  Yet this must be attempted; for Shelley is the only English poet who has successfully handled that most difficult of metres, terza rima.  His power over complicated versification cannot be appreciated except by duly noticing the method he employed in treating a structure alien, perhaps, to the genius of our literature, and even in Italian used with perfect mastery by none but Dante.  To select the introduction and part of the first paragraph will inflict less violence upon the “Triumph of Life” as a whole, than to detach one of its episodes.

    Swift as a spirit hastening to his task
    Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
    Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask

    Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth. 
    The smokeless altars of the mountain snows
    Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth

    Of light, the Ocean’s orison arose,
    To which the birds tempered their matin lay. 
    All flowers in field or forest which unclose

    Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day,
    Swinging their censers in the element,
    With orient incense lit by the new ray,

    Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent
    Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air;
    And, in succession due, did continent,

    Isle, ocean, and all things that in them wear
    The form and character of mortal mould,
    Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear

    Their portion of the toil, which he of old
    Took as his own, and then imposed on them. 
    But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold

    Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem
    The cone of night, now they were laid asleep,
    Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem

    Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep
    Of a green Apennine.  Before me fled
    The night; behind me rose the day; the deep

    Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head,—­
    When a strange trance over my fancy grew
    Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread

    Was so transparent that the scene came through
    As clear as, when a veil of light is drawn
    O’er evening hills, they glimmer; and I knew