lusion, nor night in his blindness.
The poet sees most clearly what his ideal is; he suffers no illusion
in the expression of his own soul. His political utopias, his belief
in the power of love, and his cryingly subjective and inconstant way
of judging people are one side of the picture; the other is his
lyrical power, wealth, and ecstasy. If he had understood universal
nature, he would not have so glorified in his own. And his own nature
was worth glorifying; it was, I think, the purest, tenderest,
richest, most rational nature ever poured forth in verse. I have not
read in any language such a full expression of the unadulterated
instincts of the mind. The world of Shelley is that which the vital
monad within many of us--I will not say within all, for who shall set
bounds to the variations of human nature?--the world which the vital
monad within many of us, I say, would gladly live in if it could have
its way.

Matthew Arnold said that Shelley was not quite sane; and certainly he
was not quite sane, if we place sanity in justness of external
perception, adaptation to matter, and docility to the facts; but his
lack of sanity was not due to any internal corruption; it was not even
an internal eccentricity. He was like a child, like a Platonic soul
just fallen from the Empyrean; and the child may be dazed, credulous,
and fanciful; but he is not mad. On the contrary, his earnest
playfulness, the constant distraction of his attention from
observation to daydreams, is the sign of an inward order and fecundity
appropriate to his age. If children did not see visions, good men
would have nothing to work for. It is the soul of observant persons,
like Matthew Arnold, that is apt not to be quite sane and whole
inwardly, but somewhat warped by familiarity with the perversities of
real things, and forced to misrepresent its true ideal, like a tree
bent by too prevalent a wind. Half the fertility of such a soul is
lost, and the other half is denaturalised. No doubt, in its sturdy
deformity, the practical mind is an instructive and not unpleasing
object, an excellent, if somewhat pathetic, expression of the climate
in which it is condemned to grow, and of its dogged clinging to an
ingrate soil; but it is a wretched expression of its innate
possibilities. Shelley, on the contrary, is like a palm-tree in the
desert or a star in the sky; he is perfect in the midst of the void.
His obtuseness to things dynamic--to the material order--le