as hidden from him by a cloud, all woven of shifting
rainbows and bright tears. Only his emotional haste made it possible
for him to entertain such, opinions as he did entertain; or rather,
it was inevitable that the mechanism of nature, as it is in its
depths, should remain in his pictures only the shadowiest of
backgrounds. His poetry is accordingly a part of the poetry of
illusion; the poetry of truth, if we have the courage to hope for such
a thing, is reserved for far different and yet unborn poets. But it is
only fair to Shelley to remember that the moral being of mankind is as
yet in its childhood; all poets play with images not understood; they
touch on emotions sharply, at random, as in a dream; they suffer each
successive vision, each poignant sentiment, to evaporate into nothing,
or to leave behind only a heart vaguely softened and fatigued, a
gentle languor, or a tearful hope. Every modern school of poets, once
out of fashion, proves itself to have been sadly romantic and
sentimental. None has done better than to spangle a confused sensuous
pageant with some sparks of truth, or to give it some symbolic
relation to moral experience. And this Shelley has done as well as
anybody: all other poets also have been poets of illusion. The
distinction of Shelley is that his illusions are so wonderfully fine,
subtle, and palpitating; that they betray passions and mental habits
so singularly generous and pure. And why? Because he did not believe
in the necessity of what is vulgar, and did not pay that demoralising
respect to it, under the title of fact or of custom, which it exacts
from most of us. The past seemed to him no valid precedent, the
present no final instance. As he believed in the imminence of an
overturn that should make all things new, he was not checked by any
divided allegiance, by any sense that he was straying into the vapid
or fanciful, when he created what he justly calls "Beautiful idealisms
of moral excellence."

That is what his poems are fundamentally--the _Skylark_, and the
_Witch of the Atlas_, and the _Sensitive Plant_ no less than the
grander pieces. He infused into his gossamer world the strength of his
heroic conscience. He felt that what his imagination pictured was a
true symbol of what human experience should and might pass into.
Otherwise he would have been aware of playing with idle images; his
poetry would have been mere millinery and his politics mere business;
he would have been a