tingness,"

and others have felt that the freedom from self, which is attained
in the vision, is supremely good. What is peculiar to him, and
distinguishes him from the poets of religious mysticism, is that he
reflected rationally on his vision, brought it more or less into harmony
with a philosophical system, and, in embracing it, always had in
view the improvement of mankind. Not for a moment, though, must it
be imagined that he was a didactic poet. It was the theory of the
eighteenth century, and for a brief period, when the first impulse of
the Romantic Movement was spent, it was again to become the theory
of the nineteenth century, that the object of poetry is to inculcate
correct principles of morals and religion. Poetry, with its power of
pleasing, was the jam which should make us swallow the powder unawares.
This conception was abhorrent to Shelley, both because poetry ought not
to do what can be done better by prose, and also because, for him,
the pleasure and the lesson were indistinguishably one. The poet is to
improve us, not by insinuating a moral, but by communicating to others
something of that ecstasy with which he himself burns in contemplating
eternal truth and beauty and goodness.

Hitherto all the writings mentioned have been, except 'The Defence of
Poetry', those of a young and enthusiastic revolutionary, which might
have some interest in their proper historical and biographical setting,
but otherwise would only be read as curiosities. We have seen that
beneath Shelley's twofold drift towards practical politics and
speculative philosophy a deeper force was working. Yet it is
characteristic of him that he always tended to regard the writing
of verse as a 'pis aller'. In 1819, when he was actually working on
'Prometheus', he wrote to Peacock, "I consider poetry very subordinate
to moral and political science," adding that he only wrote it because
his feeble health made it hopeless to attempt anything more useful. We
need not take this too seriously; he was often wrong about the reasons
for his own actions. From whatever motive, write poetry he did. We will
now consider some of the more voluminous, if not the most valuable,
results.

'Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude,' (4) is a long poem, written in
1815, which seems to shadow forth the emotional history of a young and
beautiful poet. As a child he drank deep of the beauties of nature and
the sublimest creations of the intellect, until,

"When