The Shelley Centenary was celebrated at Horsham on 'Thursday, when
Mr. Gosse delivered a temperate and judicious panegyric on the poet, though we cannot at all agree with, if we rightly understand, the remark that "no other poet swept so broadly the full diapason of man in Nature." The human aspects of Nature have been surely far more effectively rendered by Wordsworth, and even by Scott. Shelley was like his own "Witch of Atlas," or the various Spirits in his "Prometheus Unbound," a distiller of some of the more ethereal essences of Nature rather than an utterer of the human sympathies which Nature excites. Nothing so good as Mr. Watson's singularly fine poem on Shelley, which we had the privilege of publishing last week, was read, or, indeed, could have been expected to be read, at the Horsham celebration.
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