elibacy and prostitution. These threads, and many others,
were all taken up in his first serious poem, 'Queen Mab' (1812-13), an
over-long rhapsody, partly in blank verse, partly in loose metres. The
spirit of Ianthe is rapt by the Fairy Mab in her pellucid car to the
confines of the universe, where the past, present, and future of the
earth are unfolded to the spirit's gaze. We see tyrants writhing upon
their thrones; Ahasuerus, "the wandering Jew," is introduced; the
consummation on earth of the age of reason is described. In the end the
fairy's car brings the spirit back to its body, and Ianthe wakes to find

"Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,
Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,
And the bright beaming stars
That through the casement shone."

Though many poets have begun their careers with something better than
this, 'Queen Mab' will always be read, because it gives us, in embryo,
the whole of Shelley at a stroke. The melody of the verse is thin and
loose, but it soars from the ground and spins itself into a series
of etherial visions. And these visions, though they look utterly
disconnected from reality, are in fact only an aspect of his passionate
interest in science. In this respect the sole difference between 'Queen
Mab' and such poems as 'The West Wind' and 'The Cloud' is that, in the
prose of the notes appended to 'Queen Mab', with their disquisitions on
physiology and astronomy, determinism and utilitarianism, the scientific
skeleton is explicit. These notes are a queer medley. We may laugh at
their crudity--their certainty that, once orthodoxy has been destroyed
by argument, the millennium will begin; what is more to the purpose is
to recognise that here is something more than the ordinary dogmatism of
youthful ignorance. There is a flow of vigorous language, vividness of
imagination, and, above all, much conscientious reasoning and a passion
for hard facts. His wife was not far wrong when she praised him for a
"logical exactness of reason." The arguments he uses are, indeed, all
second-hand, and mostly fallacious; but he knew instinctively something
which is for ever hidden from the mass of mankind--the difference
between an argument and a confused stirring of prejudices. Then, again,
he was not content with abstract generalities: he was always trying to
enforce his views by facts industriously collected from such books of
medicine, anatomy, geology, astronomy, chemistr