mind.
Such reverence paid by the poet to his gift calls to mind the multiple
Miss Beauchamp, of psychologic fame, and her comment on the vagaries of
her various personalities, "But after all, they are all me!" Too often,
when the poet is kneeling in adoration of his Muse, the irreverent
reader is likely to suspect that he realizes, only too well, that it is
"all me."

However, if the Philistine reader sets up as a critic, he must make good
his charges. Have we any real grounds for declaring that the alleged
divinity who inspires the poet is merely his own intelligence, or lack
of it? Perhaps not. And yet the dabbler in psychology finds a good deal
to indicate the poet's impression that the "subconscious" is shaping his
verse. Shelley was especially fascinated by the mysterious regions of
his mind lying below the threshold of his ordinary thought. In fact,
some of his prose speculations are in remarkable sympathy with recent
scientific papers on the subject. [Footnote: See _Speculations on
Metaphysics_, Works, Vol. VI, p. 282, edited by Buxton Forman.] And
in _Mont Blanc_ he expresses his wonder at the phenomenon of
thought:

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters.

Again, in _The Defense of Poetry_ he says,

The mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory
brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a
flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its
approach or departure.

Wordsworth, too, thinks of his gift as arising from the depths of his
mind, which are not subject to conscious control. He apprises us,

A plastic power
Abode with me, a forming hand, at times
Rebellious, acting in a devious mood,
A local spirit of its own, at war
With general tendency, but for the most
Subservient strictly to external things
With which it communed. An auxiliary light
Came from my mind which on the setting sun
Bestowed new splendor--
[Footnote: _The Prelude_.]

Occasionally the sudden lift of these submerged ideas to consciousness
is expressed by the figure of an earthquake. Aurora Leigh says that upon
her fi