BIRDS AND POETS. 
169 
dissolubly in his memory tlie image of this Poet with that 
of the Skylark. One could not avoid this association, even 
if the Ode to a Skylark " had never been written. The 
Poet felt it to be his skiey Brother, and greeted it out of his 
heart of hearts, in the silver-footed cadences of that most 
rare of exquisite strains. It seems to us that the poet had 
unconsciously thrown out his own soul upon those music- 
hinged plumes up the blue dome of air, 
" To float and run 
Like an unbodied joy whose race has just begun." 
It is evident that, in the simplicity of this beautiful ego- 
tism, he was singing to, and of himself, without being aware. 
In all poetry, there is not a more nice and perfect similitude 
of the life and mission of the individual Poet, than that he 
has furnished of his own in this ode. Who other than 
Shelley is 
" Like a poet hidden 
In the light of thought, 
Singing hymns unbidden, 
Till the world is wrought 
To sympathize with hopes and fears it heeded not !" 
But it was an atmosphere akin to the sun-bright radiance of 
a prophet's brow, in which he was " hidden ;" and the vision 
of bat-eyed, oblivious dreamers has shrunk before it, because 
it was of a 
" Light diviner than the common sun." 
Such " muling " in their dull infanticide of thought, have 
been venomous as they knew how to be in denouncing him 
as " a cold, incomprehensible Idealist !" Miss Barrett, in her 
magnificent "Vision of the Poets," has been most shame- 
fully disloyal to the glorious apprehensions in herself, when 
amidst such " goodlie companie," she dismissed this poet 
down the ages, on the attenuated echo of this vulgar lie : 
