He flew at the grand, the spacious, the sublime; and did not always succeed in realizing for his readers what he had imagined.

A certain want of faith in his own powers, fostered by the extraordinary discouragement under which he had to write, prevented him from finishing what he began, or from giving that ultimate form of perfection to his longer works which we admire in shorter pieces like the "Ode to the West Wind".

When a poem was ready, he had it hastily printed, and passed on to fresh creative efforts.

If anything occurred to interrupt his energy, he flung the sketch aside.

Some of these defects, if we may use this word at all to indicate our sense that Shelley might by care have been made equal to his highest self, were in a great measure the correlative of his chief quality--the ideality, of which I have already spoken.