thought by thought, she quenched them, and all that was, seemed, as he gazed, as if it had been not. That is the swift succession of aspiration, thought, and feeling, each dying as its successor is born, which we know when we are young, and the sense, then also ours, of all the outward world becoming, in the pursuit of the ideal, as if it had no real being. At last the mystery of life which cannot be repressed, begins to stir within the youth. He can no longer resist the fatal question all must ask, and-"Show whence I came, he cries, and where I am, and why." "Arise and quench thy thirst," the Shape replies; and as he drank the cup, this Dream of youth grew dim, and her light a light of heaven that hereafter glimmered only, forever sought again, forever lost-waned in the glare of the Masque of Life that now rushed through the forest. It is the entrance into manhood, life as it is in the world of action. He sees and it seems the answer to his question-the car in which Life itself is borne, its captives, and those who played, or gazed; or followed, or out-speeded the car-all as yet young. He himself plunges into "the thickest billows of that living storm," but before the chariot had begun to climb the steep of middle age a new wonder grew.

The weariness, the cruel working of life's secret, begins to exhaust and destroy all the pleasure, all the eagerness, with which men at the first follow the chariot of Life. The way in which Shelley images this change, and the cause he assigns for it, are as imaginative

as they are original. Shadows began to people the
grove, dense flocks of phantoms, of various quality
and shape, who hid in the capes of kings, and rode
across the tiara of popes; and some were old ana-
tomies that hatched broods, and whose dead eyes
took power and gave it to those who ruined earth;
and some fell like flashes of discoloured snow on
the bosoms of the young and were melted by the
glow which they extinguished; and others, like small
gnats, thronged about the brows of lawyer, states-
man, priest, and theorist. Shelley invents all kinds
of them, and each has its meaning. These are the
thoughts, written or spoken, the work and the pas-
sions of men; all that men have poured forth from
their hearts or impressed upon the world; the old
theologies, the old doctrines of kingcraft whose dead
eyes have power; the political theories, poetry, philo-
sophies, which have been sent forth from the begin-
ning of humanity, but which poured forth so fast and
furious before the Revolution. Rousseau knows
whence they came.
"Each one

"Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly
These shadows."

And

Shadows as they were, form was given them by the creative rays of the car, for all the thoughts and feelings of men are moulded by the mystery of life. so moulded, and darkening all the ways of the pageant with the sense of the deep mystery that gave them

shape, they did their work, and hour by hour the unconquerable secret, embodied in the forms given to it by the infinite questioning of men, destroyed its victims.

From every form the beauty slowly waned;
From every firmest limb and fairest face

The strength and freshness fell like dust

And long before the day of life

Was old, the joy which waked like heaven's glance

The sleepers in the oblivious valley died;

And some grew weary of the ghastly dance,
And fell as I have fallen, by the wayside ;-

And those fell soonest who had done most creative work; who had thought and felt and expressed the most—the more passionate, whether for good or evil, the worse off.

Those soonest from whose forms most shadows passed,
And least of strength and beauty did abide.

"Then what is Life?" I cried.

And with that cry all that Shelley wrote is ended.