a letter to Leigh
Hunt, "you know that I do not deal in those articles; you might as well
go to a gin-shop for a leg of mutton as expect anything human or earthly
from me." Yet it is certain that the figures behind the shifting web of
metaphors are partly real--that the poisonous enchantress is his first
wife, and the moon that saved him from despair his second wife. The last
part of the poem hymns the bliss of union with the ideal. Emily must fly
with him; "a ship is floating in the harbour now," and there is "an isle
under Ionian skies," the fairest of all Shelley's imaginary landscapes,
where their two souls may become one. Then, at the supreme moment, the
song trembles and stops:

"Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the heights of love's rare universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire--
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire."

We have now taken some view of the chief of Shelley's longer poems.
Most of these were published during his life. They brought him little
applause and much execration, but if he had written nothing else his
fame would still be secure. They are, however, less than half of the
verse that he actually wrote. Besides many completed poems, it remained
for his wife to decipher, from scraps of paper, scribbled over,
interlined, and erased, a host of fragments, all valuable, and many of
them gems of purest ray. We must now attempt a general estimate of this
whole output.

Chapter III The Poet of Rebellion, of Nature, and of Love

It may seem strange that so much space has been occupied in the last
two chapters by philosophical and political topics, and this although
Shelley is the most purely lyrical of English poets. The fact is that
in nearly all English poets there is a strong moral and philosophical
strain, particularly in those of the period 1770-1830. They are deeply
interested in political, scientific, and religious speculations in
aesthetic questions only superficially, if at all Shelley, with the
tap-roots of his emotions striking deep into politics and philosophy,
is only an extreme instance of a national trait, which was unusually
prominent in the early part of the nineteenth century owing to the state
of our insular politics at the time though it must be admitted that
English artists of all periods have an inherent tendency to moralise
which has sometimes been a weakness, and sometimes has given them
surprising strength.

Lik