is its Promethean spirit. He
maintained that the basis of moral authority was internal, diffused
among all individuals; that it was the natural love of the beautiful
and the good wherever it might spring, and however fate might oppose
it.

"To suffer ...
To forgive ...
To defy Power ...
To love and bear; to hope, till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This ... is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free."

Shelley was also removed from any ordinary atheism by his truly
speculative sense for eternity. He was a thorough Platonist All
metaphysics perhaps is poetry, but Platonic metaphysics is good
poetry, and to this class Shelley's belongs. For instance:

"The pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the same.
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!
He hath awakened from the dream of life.
'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife.

"He is made one with Nature. There is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.

"He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely.

"The splendours of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not:
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
... the dead live there."

Atheism or pantheism of this stamp cannot be taxed with being gross or
materialistic; the trouble is rather that it is too hazy in its
sublimity. The poet has not perceived the natural relation between
facts and ideals so clearly or correctly as he has felt the moral
relation between them. But his allegiance to the intuition which
defies, for the sake of felt excellence, every form of idolatry or
cowardice wearing the mask of religion--this allegiance is itself the
purest religion; and it is capable of inspiring the sweetest and most
absolute poetry. In daring to lay bare the truths of fate, the poet
creates for himself the subtlest and most heroic harmonies; and he is
comforted for the illusions he has lost by being made incapable of
desiring