men than we imagine, who trace to the emotion Shelley awakened in them when they were young, their wider and better views of God. Many men, also, who were quite careless of religion, yet cared for poetry, were led, and are still led, to think concerning the grounds of a true worship, by the moral enthusiasm which Shelley applied to theology. He made emotion burn around it, and we owe to him a great deal of its nearer advance to the teaching of Christ. But we owe it, not to those portions of his poetry which denounced what was false and evil, but to those which represented and revealed, in delight in its beauty, what was good and true. Had he remained in England, I do not think he would have worked on this matter in the ideal way of Prometheus Unbound, because continual contact with the reigning theology would have driven his easily wrought anger into direct violence. In Italy, in exile, it was different. The polemical temper in which he wrote the Revolt of Islam changed into the poetical temper in which he wrote Prometheus Unbound.

his exile, is the

to a Source of He was not an atheist or

Connected with this, but not with question, in what way his belief as Nature influenced his art. a materialist. If he may be said to have occupied any theoretical position, it was that of an Ideal Pantheist ; the position which, with regard to Nature, a modern poet who cares for the subject, naturally-whatever

art.

may be his personal view-adopts in the realm of his Wordsworth, a plain Christian at home, wrote about Nature as a Pantheist: the artist, as I said, loves to conceive of the Universe, not as dead, but as alive. Into that belief Shelley, in hours of inspiration, continually rose, and his work is seldom more impassioned and beautiful than in the passages where he feels and believes in this manner. The finest example is towards the close of the Adonais. In his mind however, the living spirit which, in its living, made the Universe, was not conceived of as Thought, as Wordsworth conceived it, but as Love operating into Beauty; and there is a passage on this idea in the fragment of the Coliseum, which is as beautiful in prose as that in Adonais is in verse. But it is only in higher poetic hours that Shelley seems or cares to realise this belief. In the quieter realms of poetry, in daily life, he confessed no such creed plainly; he had little or no belief in a thinking or loving existence behind the phenomenal universe. It is infinitely improbable, he says, that the cause of mind is similar to mind. Nothing can be more characteristic of him-and he has the same temper in other matters-than that he should have a faith with regard to a Source of Nature, into which he could soar when he pleased, in which he could live for a time, but which he did not choose to live in, to define, or to realise, continuously. When, in the Prometheus Unbound, he is forced, as it were, to

realise a central cause, he creates Demogorgon, the dullest of all his impersonations. It is scarcely an impersonation. Once he calls it a "living spirit," but it has neither form nor outline in his mind. He keeps it before him as an “awful Shape."

The

The truth is, the indefinite was a beloved element of his life. "Lift not the painted veil," he cries, "which those who live call Life." His worst pain was when he thought he had lifted it, and seemed to know the reality. But he did not always believe that he had done so, or he preferred to deny his conclusion. Not as a thinker in prose, but as a poet, he frequently loved the vague with an intensity which raised it almost into an object of worship. speech of the Third Spirit, in the Ode to Heaven, is a wonderful instance of what I may call the rapture in indefiniteness. But this rapture had its other side, and when he was depressed by ill-health, the sense of a voiceless, boundless abyss, which for ever held its secret, and in which he floated, deepened his depression. The horror of a homeless and centreless heart which then beset him, is passionately expressed in the Cenci. Beatrice is speaking

"Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts, if there should be No God, no Heaven, no Earth, in the void world; The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world."

But, on the whole, whether it brought him pain or joy, he preferred to be without a fixed belief with regard

to a source of Nature. Could he have done otherwise, could he have given continuous substance in his thoughts to the great conception of ideal Pantheism in which Wordsworth rested, Shelley's whole work on Nature and his description of her would have been more direct, palpable, and homely. He would have loved Nature more, and made us love it more.

The result of all this is that a great deal of his poetry of Nature has no ground in thought, and consequently wants power. It is not that he could not have had this foundation and its strength. Both are his when he chooses. But, for the most part, he did not choose. Such was his temperament that he liked better to live with Nature and be without a centre for her. He would be

Dizzy, lost—but unbewailing.

But I am not sure whether the love of the undefined did not, in the first instance, arise out of his love of the constantly changing, and that itself out of the very character of his intellect, and the temper of his heart. His intellect, incessantly shaken into movement by his imagination, continually threw into new shapes the constant ideas he possessed. His heart, out of which are the issues of imagination, loved deeply a few great conceptions, but wearied almost immediately of any special form in which he embodied them, and changed it for another. In the matter of human love, he was uncontent with all the

earthly images he formed of the ideal he had loved and continued to love in his own soul, and he could not but tend to change the images. In the ordinary life of feeling, the moment any emotion arose in his heart, a hundred others came rushing from every quarter into the original feeling, and mingled with it, and changed its outward expression. Sometimes they all clamoured for expression, and we see that Shelley often tried to answer their call. It is when he does this that he is most obscure-obscure through abundance of feelings and their forms. His intellect, heart, and imagination were in a kind of Heraclitean flux, perpetually evolving fresh images, and the new, in swift succession, clouding the old; and then, impatient weariness of rest or of any one thing whatever, driving forward within him this incessant movement, he sank, at last and for the time, exhausted—“ As summer clouds disburthened of their rain."

There is no need to illustrate this from his poetry. The huddling rush of images, the changeful crowd of thoughts are found on almost every page. It is often only the oneness of the larger underlying emotion or idea which makes the work clear. We strive to grasp a Proteus as we read. In an instant the thought or the feeling Shelley is expressing becomes impalpable, vanishes, reappears in another form, and then in a multitude of other forms, each in turn eluding the grasp of the intellect, until at last we seize the god himself, and know what Shelley meant, or