ke first his own house, for he was
in this matter also like a child playing with the world, and then houses
of other people, places where one could live happily; and he obeyed it
when he wrote essays about the nature of happy work, and when he spoke at
street corners about the coming changes.

He knew clearly what he was doing towards the end, for he lived at a time
when poets and artists have begun again to carry the burdens that priests
and theologians took from them angrily some few hundred years ago. His art
was not more essentially religious than Rossetti's art, but it was
different, for Rossetti, drunken with natural beauty, saw the supernatural
beauty, the impossible beauty, in his frenzy, while he being less intense
and more tranquil would show us a beauty that would wither if it did not
set us at peace with natural things, and if we did not believe that it
existed always a little, and would some day exist in its fulness. He may
not have been, indeed he was not, among the very greatest of the poets,
but he was among the greatest of those who prepare the last reconciliation
when the Cross shall blossom with roses.

1902.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY'S POETRY

I. HIS RULING IDEAS

When I was a boy in Dublin I was one of a group who rented a room in a
mean street to discuss philosophy. My fellow-students got more and more
interested in certain modern schools of mystical belief, and I never found
anybody to share my one unshakable belief. I thought that whatever of
philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent, and that one should
begin to arrange it in some regular order, rejecting nothing as the
make-believe of the poets. I thought, so far as I can recollect my
thoughts after so many years, that if a powerful and benevolent spirit has
shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from
the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world, than from
historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers. Since
then I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now
certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that
the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is
still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know. I have
re-read _Prometheus Unbound_, which I had hoped my fellow-students would
have studied as a sacred book, and it seems to me to have an even more
certain place than I