t us in
sleep,' spiritual essences whose shadows are the delights of all the
senses, sounds 'folded in cells of crystal silence,' 'visions swift and
sweet and quaint,' which lie waiting their moment 'each in his thin sheath
like a chrysalis,' 'odours' among 'ever-blooming eden trees', 'liquors'
that can give 'happy sleep,' or can make tears 'all wonder and delight';
'The golden genii who spoke to the poets of Greece in dreams'; 'the
phantoms' which become the forms of the arts when 'the mind, arising
bright from the embrace of beauty,' 'casts on them the gathered rays which
are reality'; the 'guardians' who move in 'the atmosphere of human
thought' as 'the birds within the wind, or the fish within the wave,' or
man's thought itself through all things; and who join the throng of the
happy hours when Time is passing away--

'As the flying fish leap
From the Indian deep,
And mix with the seabirds half asleep.'

It is these powers which lead Asia and Panthea, as they would lead all the
affections of humanity, by words written upon leaves, by faint songs, by
eddies of echoes that draw 'all spirits on that secret way,' by the 'dying
odours' of flowers and by 'the sunlight of the sphered dew,' beyond the
gates of birth and death to awake Demogorgon, eternity, that 'the painted
veil' 'called life' may be 'torn aside.'

There are also ministers of ugliness and all evil, like those that came
to Prometheus--

'As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
To gather for her festal crown of flowers,
The aerial crimson falls, flushing her cheek,
So from our victim's destined agony
The shade which is our form invests us round;
Else we are shapeless as our mother Night.'

Or like those whose shapes the poet sees in _The Triumph of Life_, coming
from the procession that follows the car of life, as 'hope' changes to
'desire,' shadows 'numerous as the dead leaves blown in autumn evening
from a poplar tree'; and resembling those they come from, until, if I
understand an obscure phrase aright, they are 'wrapt' round 'all the busy
phantoms that live there as the sun shapes the clouds.' Some to sit
'chattering like apes,' and some like 'old anatomies' 'hatching their bare
broods under the shade of daemons' wings,' laughing 'to reassume the
delegated powers' they had given to the tyrants of the earth, and some
'like small gnats and flies' to throng 'about the brow of lawyers,
statesmen, priest and theorist,