s underlies the right, and
the development of the self-reliant individual is a preparation for the
life of fellowship.

CHAPTER VIII

SHELLEY

If it were possible to blot out from our mind its memory of the Bible
and of Protestant theology, and with that mind of artificial vacancy to
read _Paradise Lost_ and _Samson Agonistes_, how strange and great and
mad would the genius of Milton appear. We should wonder at his creative
mythological imagination, but we should marvel past all comprehending at
his conceptions of the divine order, and the destiny of man. To attempt
to understand Shelley without the aid of Godwin is a task hardly more
promising than it would be to read Milton without the Bible.

The parallel is so close that one is tempted to pursue it further, for
there is between these two poets a close sympathy amid glaring
contrasts. Each admitted in spite of his passion for an ideal world an
absorbing concern in human affairs, and a vehement interest in the
contemporary struggle for liberty. If the one was a Republican Puritan
and the other an anarchical atheist, the dress which their passion for
liberty assumed was the uniform of the day. Neither was an original
thinker. Each steeped himself in the classics. But more important even
than the classics in the influences which moulded their minds, were the
dogmatic systems to which they attached themselves. It is not the power
of novel and pioneer thought which distinguishes a philosophical from a
purely sensuous mind. Shelley no more innovated or created in
metaphysics or politics than did Milton. But each had, with his gift of
imagery, and his power of musical speech, an intellectual view of the
universe. The name of Milton suggests to us eloquent rhythms and images
which pose like Grecian sculpture. But Milton's world was the world as
the grave, gowned men saw it who composed the Westminster Confession.
The name of Shelley rings like the dying fall of a song, or floats
before our eyes amid the faery shapes of wind-tossed clouds. But
Shelley's world was the world of the utilitarian Godwin and the
mathematical Condorcet. The supremacy of an intellectual vision is not a
common characteristic among poets, but it raises Milton and Shelley to
the choir in which Dante and Goethe are leaders. For Keats beauty was
truth, and that was all he cared to know. Coleridge, indeed, was a
metaphysician of some pretensions, but the "honey dew" on which he fed
when he wro