he whole organisation of men.
And the feeling is one with which a Catholic must sympathise, in an age
when--if we may say so without irreverence--the Almighty has been made a
constitutional Deity, with certain state-grants of worship, but no
influence over political affairs. In these matters his aims were
generous, if his methods were perniciously mistaken. In his theory of
Free Love alone, borrowed like the rest from the Revolution, his aim was
as mischievous as his method. At the same time he was at least logical.
His theory was repulsive, but comprehensible. Whereas from our present
_via media_--facilitation of divorce--can only result the era when the
young lady in reduced circumstances will no longer turn governess but
will be open to engagement as wife at a reasonable stipend.

We spoke of the purity of Shelley's poetry. We know of but three
passages to which exception can be taken. One is happily hidden under a
heap of Shelleian rubbish. Another is offensive, because it presents his
theory of Free Love in its most odious form. The third is very much a
matter, we think, for the individual conscience. Compare with this the
genuinely corrupt Byron, through the cracks and fissures of whose heaving
versification steam up perpetually the sulphurous vapours from his
central iniquity. We cannot credit that any Christian ever had his faith
shaken through reading Shelley, unless his faith were shaken before he
read Shelley. Is any safely havened bark likely to slip its cable, and
make for a flag planted on the very reef where the planter himself was
wrecked?

* * * * *

Why indeed (one is tempted to ask in concluding) should it be that the
poets who have written for us the poetry richest in skiey grain, most
free from admixture with the duller things of earth--the Shelleys, the
Coleridges, the Keats--are the very poets whose lives are among the
saddest records in literature? Is it that (by some subtile mystery of
analogy) sorrow, passion, and fantasy are indissolubly connected, like
water, fire, and cloud; that as from sun and dew are born the vapours, so
from fire and tears ascend the "visions of aerial joy"; that the harvest
waves richest over the battlefields of the soul; that the heart, like the
earth, smells sweetest after rain; that the spell on which depend such
necromantic castles is some spirit of pain charm-poisoned at their base?
{10} Such a poet, it may be, mists with sighs the window of his life