made, we can
hardly fail to admit that he was one of the greatest of English Puritans.

(3) THE POET OF HOPE

Shelley is the poet for a revolutionary age. He is the poet of hope, as
Wordsworth is the poet of wisdom. He has been charged with being
intangible and unearthly, but he is so only in the sense in which the
future is intangible and unearthly. He is no more unearthly than the
skylark or the rainbow or the dawn. His world, indeed, is a universe of
skylarks and rainbows and dawns--a universe in which

Like a thousand dawns on a single night
The splendours rise and spread.

He at once dazzles and overwhelms us with light and music. He is unearthly
in the sense that as we read him we seem to move in a new element. We lose
to some extent the gravity of flesh and find ourselves wandering among
stars and sunbeams, or diving under sea or stream to visit the buried day
of some wonder-strewn cave. There are other great poets besides Shelley
who have had a vision of the heights and depths. Compared with him,
however, they have all about them something of Goliath's disadvantageous
bulk. Shelley alone retains a boyish grace like David's, and does not seem
to groan under the burden of his task. He does not round his shoulders in
gloom in the presence of Heaven and Hell. His cosmos is a constellation.
His thousand dawns are shaken out over the earth with a promise that turns
even the long agony of Prometheus into joy. There is no other joy in
literature like Shelley's. It is the joy not of one who is blind or
untroubled, but of one who, in a midnight of tyranny and suffering of the
unselfish, has learned

... to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

To write like this is to triumph over death. It is to cease to be a victim
and to become a creator. Shelley recognized that the world had been bound
into slavery by the Devil, but he more than anyone else believed that it
was possible for the human race in a single dayspring to recover the first
intention of God.

In the great morning of the world,
The Spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos.

Shelley desired to restore to earth not the past of man but the past of
God. He lacked the bad sort of historical sense that will sacrifice the
perfect to-morrow to pride in the imperfect yesterday. He was the devoted
enemy of that dark spirit of Power which holds fast to the old greed as to
a tre