e from before our
imperfect organs; they remain in their "love, beauty, and delight," in a
world congenial to them, and we, clogged by "error, ignorance, and
strife," see them not till we are fitted by purification and improvement
to their higher state.' Not merely happy souls, but all beautiful places
and movements and gestures and events, when we think they have ceased to
be, have become portions of the eternal.

'In this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant, if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

This garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away;
'Tis we, 'tis ours are changed, not they.

For love and beauty and delight
There is no death, nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.'

He seems in his speculations to have lit on that memory of nature the
visionaries claim for the foundation of their knowledge; but I do not know
whether he thought, as they do, that all things good and evil remain for
ever, 'thinking the thought and doing the deed,' though not, it may be,
self-conscious; or only thought that 'love and beauty and delight' remain
for ever. The passage where Queen Mab awakes 'all knowledge of the past,'
and the good and evil 'events of old and wondrous times,' was no more
doubtless than a part of the machinery of the poem, but all the
machineries of poetry are parts of the convictions of antiquity, and
readily become again convictions in minds that dwell upon them in a spirit
of intense idealism.

Intellectual Beauty has not only the happy dead to do her will, but
ministering spirits who correspond to the Devas of the East, and the
Elemental Spirits of mediaeval Europe, and the Sidhe of ancient Ireland,
and whose too constant presence, and perhaps Shelley's ignorance of their
more traditional forms, give some of his poetry an air of rootless
phantasy. They change continually in his poetry, as they do in the visions
of the mystics everywhere and of the common people in Ireland, and the
forms of these changes display, in an especial sense, the glowing forms of
his mind when freed from all impulse not out of itself or out of
supersensual power. These are 'gleams of a remoter world which visi