ere the first leaf looked brown, she died!"
The last part of the poem, a pendant to the first, is full of the
horrors of corruption and decay when the power of good has vanished and
the power of evil is triumphant. Cruel frost comes, and snow,

"And a northern whirlwind, wandering about
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,
Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and stiff,
And snapped them off with his rigid griff.

When winter had gone and spring came back
The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;
But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels,
Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels."

Then there is an epilogue saying quite baldly that perhaps we may
console ourselves by believing that

"In this life Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.

For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change: their might
Exceeds our organs which endure
No light, being themselves obscure."

The fact is that Shelley's melancholy is intimately connected with his
philosophical ideas. It is the creed of the student of Berkeley, of
Plato, of Spinoza. What is real and unchanging is the one spirit
which interpenetrates and upholds the world with "love and beauty and
delight," and this spirit--the vision which Alastor pursued in vain, the
"Unseen Power" of the 'Ode to Intellectual Beauty'--is what is always
suggested by his poetry at its highest moments. The suggestion, in
its fulness, is of course ineffable; only in the case of Shelley some
approach can be made to naming it, because he happened to be steeped in
philosophical ways of thinking. The forms in which he gave it expression
are predominantly melancholy, because this kind of idealism, with its
insistence on the unreality of evil, is the recoil from life of an
unsatisfied and disappointed soul.

His philosophy of love is but a special case of this all-embracing
doctrine. We saw how in 'Epipsychidion' he rejected monogamic principles
on the ground that true love is increased, not diminished, by division,
and we can now understand why he