parency of passion which excites, by reason of its sublime
"immorality," the gross fury of the cynical and the base, gives an
immortal beauty, cold and distant and beyond "the shadow of our
night," to his planetary melodies. It is, indeed, the old Pythagorean
"music of the spheres" audible at last again. Such sounds has the
_silence_ that descends upon us when we look up, above the roofs
of the city, at Arcturus or Aldebaran! To return to Shelley from the
turmoil of our gross excitements and cramped domesticities is to
bathe our foreheads in the "dew of the morning" and cool our hands
in the ultimate Sea. Whatever in us transcends the vicious circle of
personal desire; whatever in us belongs to that Life which lasts
while we and our individual cravings perish; whatever in us
underlies and overlooks this mad procession of "births and
forgettings;" whatever in us "beacons from the abode where the
Eternal are" rises to meet this celestial harmony, and sloughs off the
"muddy vesture" that would "grossly close it in." What separates
Shelley from all other poets is that with them "art" is the paramount
concern, and, after "art," morality.

With him one thinks little of art, little of the substance of any
material "teaching;" one is simply transported into the high, cold
regions where the creative gods build, like children, domes of
"many-coloured glass," wherewith to "stain the white radiance of
eternity." And after such a plunge into the antenatal reservoirs of life,
we may, if we can, go on spitting venom and raking in the gutter
with the old too-human zest, and let the "ineffectual" madman pass
and be forgotten!

I said that the effect of his writing is to trouble and sadden us. It was
as a man I spoke. That in us which responds to Shelley's verse is
precisely what dreams of the transmutation of "man" into "beyond-man."
That which saddens humanity beyond words is the daily food
of the immortals.

And yet, even in the circle of our natural moods, there is something,
sometimes, that responds to such strains as "When the lamp is
shattered" and "One word is too often profaned." Perhaps only those
who have known what it is to love as children love, and to lose hope
with the absoluteness wherewith children lose it, can enter
completely into this delicate despair. It is, indeed, the long, pitiful,
sobbing cry of bewildered disenchantment that breaks the heart of
youth when it first learns of what gross clay earth and men are