had thought, among the sacred books of the world. I
remember going to a learned scholar to ask about its deep meanings, which
I felt more than understood, and his telling me that it was Godwin's
_Political Justice_ put into rhyme, and that Shelley was a crude
revolutionist, and believed that the overturning of kings and priests
would regenerate mankind. I quoted the lines which tell how the halcyons
ceased to prey on fish, and how poisonous leaves became good for food, to
show that he foresaw more than any political regeneration, but was too
timid to push the argument. I still believe that one cannot help
believing him, as this scholar I know believes him, a vague thinker, who
mixed occasional great poetry with a phantastic rhetoric, unless one
compares such passages, and above all such passages as describe the
liberty he praised, till one has discovered the system of belief that lay
behind them. It should seem natural to find his thought full of subtlety,
for Mrs. Shelley has told how he hesitated whether he should be a
metaphysician or a poet, and has spoken of his 'huntings after the
obscure' with regret, and said of that _Prometheus Unbound_, which so many
for three generations have thought _Political Justice_ put into rhyme, 'It
requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his own to understand the
mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem. They elude the ordinary
reader by their abstraction and delicacy of distinction, but they are far
from vague. It was his design to write prose metaphysical essays on the
Nature of Man, which would have served to explain much of what is obscure
in his poetry; a few scattered fragments of observation and remarks alone
remain. He considered these philosophical views of mind and nature to be
instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry.' From these scattered
fragments and observations, and from many passages read in their light,
one soon comes to understand that his liberty was so much more than the
liberty of _Political Justice_ that it was one with Intellectual Beauty,
and that the regeneration he foresaw was so much more than the
regeneration many political dreamers have foreseen, that it could not come
in its perfection till the hours bore 'Time to his grave in eternity.' In
_A Defence of Poetry_, the profoundest essay on the foundation of poetry
in English, he shows that the poet and the lawgiver hold their station by
the right of the same faculty, the one uttering in words a