Shelley’s melancholy: It is this unsatisfied desire, this almost painful yearning with its recurring disappointment and disillusionment, that is at the root of Shelley’s melancholy. His poetry is the poetry of desire. He is always yearning, never pouring forth the strains of a thankful satisfaction; but it is either the craving of an expectant rapture or the aching of a severed nerve. This is the great distinction, which separates him from the other poetical mystics of his day. Wordsworth, for instance, is always exulting in the fullness of nature; Shelley always chasing its falling stars. Shelley follows with a wistful eye the flowing stream of beauty as it forever escapes him into the illimitable void. Hence it is that his sweetest songs are those which tell of the saddest thoughts. He wants to create a new earth and a new heaven, and so it fills him with a sense of longing and of loss. This thrill of pursuit of a fugitive ideal gives the keynote to every one of his finest poems. If we look at any of the lyrics, on which he has set the full stamp of his genius, we find that it images one of these two attitudes of intellect—the keen exquisite sense of want, gazing wildly forward or wildly backward (“looking before and after and pining for what is not”), but vainly striving to close on something, which eludes his grasp:

The desire of the moth for the star,
Or the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something after
From the sphere of our sorrow

that is the true burden of everything. Sometimes the gaze is fixed on the future and sometimes on the past; sometimes

Swiftly walk o’er the western wave
Spirit of night!
Out of the misty eastern cave,
Where all the long and lone day-light,

Thou wovest dreams of joy end dear, Which make thee terrible and fear,- Swift be thy flight!
and sometimes
When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead-
When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow’s glory is shed,
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tunes our lips have spoken,
Love’s accents are soon forgot.

This melancholy yearning is of the very essence of Shelley. He is the poet, not of all human yearning is general, but of the yearning for that youthful ecstasy, which sounds like fresh life through every nerve. He cannot be satisfied without a thrill of his whole soul. He knows nothing of serene joy. He thinks the whole universe should be ever thrilling in every fiber with mysterious tenderness.

His melancholy is thus vital to his poetry. It may be said that his music is the product of his genius and his melancholy, and that which is written in his greatest moods of melancholy, is what the world seems to like best, “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.”