Alice: An Adultery

For it is abominable to correlate the life and work of any man, whenever that work approaches the standard of genius. Work of that sort is perfectly independent of life. The purest poems spring alike from the foulest soil and from the cleanest kept. Any stimulus may stimulate. Knowing Shelley almost by heart, the present writer is still ignorant of his domestic affairs—and thanks God for it. Here, however, we have no work of genius to save from soilure. The poem is less than the man, as the editor has pointed out in his sufficiently able introduction. Nevertheless, in our opinion, the poem is sufficiently remarkable to merit consideration per se, and the poet must be considered as having entered the lists. To break a lance or two with him, then. We are very sorry that he should have selected the sonnet as the expression of his thoughts. A good deal of this story would be better told in prose (or not told at all !)—but the sonnet ! He himself knows perfectly well what a sonnet should be : the xiv