He is not, like Wordsworth, labouring at a great work whose secret progress fills him with a majestic confidence; or, like Coleridge, dreaming of works which he lacks the energy to undertake; or, save once, does he seem to have felt with Keats:-- "Fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before that books, in high piled charactery, Hold in rich garners the full ripened grain." He neither writes nor wishes to write; he simply studies, piling up the wood on the altar, and conscious of the power to call down fire from Heaven when he will.

There is something sublime in this assured confidence; yet its wisdom is less evident than its grandeur.

"No man," says Shelley, "can say, 'I will compose poetry.'" If he cannot say this of himself to-day, still less can he say it of himself to-morrow.

He cannot tell whether the illusions of youth will forsake him wholly; whether the joy of creation will cease to thrill; what unpropitious blight he may encounter in an enemy or a creditor, or harbour in an uncongenial mate.

Milton, no doubt, entirely meant what he said when he told Diodati: "I am letting my wings grow and preparing to fly, but my Pegasus has not yet feathers enough to soar aloft in the fields of air." But the danger of this protracted preparation was shown by his narrow escape from poetical shipwreck when the duty of the patriot became paramount to that of the poet.