The future and the past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flight.

The moral rings out at the end of "The Sensitive Plant" with an almost
conversational simplicity;

Death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

Most eloquent of all are the familiar lines in _Adonais_:

'Tis we who lost in stormy visions keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

and again:

The One remains, the many change and pass.
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.

In all the musical and visionary glory of _Hellas_ we seem to hear a
subtle dialogue. It never reaches a conclusion. It never issues in a
dogma. The oracle is dumb, and the end of it all is rather like a
prayer. At one moment Shelley toys with the dreary sublimity of the
Stoic notion of world-cycles. The world in the Stoic cosmogony followed
its destined course, until at last the elemental fire consumed it in the
secular blaze, which became for mediaeval Christianity the _Dies irae_.
And then once more it rose from the conflagration to repeat its own
history again, and yet again, and for ever with an ineluctable fidelity.
That nightmare haunts Shelley in _Hellas_:

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
From creation to decay,
Like the bubbles on a river,
Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

The thought returns to him in the final chorus like the "motto" of a
symphony; and he sings it in a triumphant major key:

The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn.
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

He is filled with the afflatus of prophecy, and there flow from his
lips, as if in improvisation, surely the most limpid, the most
spontaneous stanzas in our language:

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far.

He sings happily and, as it were, incautiously of Tempe and Argo, of
Orpheus and Ulysses, and then the jarring note of fear is heard:

O write no more the tale of Troy
If earth Death's scroll must be,
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free.

He has turned from the empty abstraction of the Godwinian vision of
perfection. He dissolves empires and faiths, it is true. But his
imagination calls for action and movement. The New Philosophy had drive