' and some 'like discoloured shapes of
snow' to fall 'on fairest bosoms and the sunniest hair,' to be 'melted by
the youthful glow which they extinguish,' and many to 'fling shadows of
shadows yet unlike themselves,' shadows that are shaped into new forms by
that 'creative ray' in which all move like motes.

These ministers of beauty and ugliness were certainly more than metaphors
or picturesque phrases to one who believed the 'thoughts which are called
real or external objects' differed but in regularity of recurrence from
'hallucinations, dreams, and the ideas of madness,' and lessened this
difference by telling how he had dreamed 'three several times, between
intervals of two or more years, the same precise dream,' and who had seen
images with the mind's eye that left his nerves shaken for days together.
Shadows that were as when there

'hovers
A flock of vampire bats before the glare
Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,
Strange night upon some Indian vale,'

could not but have had more than a metaphorical and picturesque being to
one who had spoken in terror with an image of himself, and who had fainted
at the apparition of a woman with eyes in her breasts, and who had tried
to burn down a wood, if we can trust Mrs. Williams' account, because he
believed a devil, who had first tried to kill him, had sought refuge
there.

It seems to me, indeed, that Shelley had reawakened in himself the age of
faith, though there were times when he would doubt, as even the saints
have doubted, and that he was a revolutionist, because he had heard the
commandment, 'If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.' I have
re-read his _Prometheus Unbound_ for the first time for many years, in the
woods of Drim-da-rod, among the Echte hills, and sometimes I have looked
towards Slieve-nan-Orr, where the country people say the last battle of
the world shall be fought till the third day, when a priest shall lift a
chalice, and the thousand years of peace begin. And I think this
mysterious song utters a faith as simple and as ancient as the faith of
those country people, in a form suited to a new age, that will understand,
with Blake, that the holy spirit is 'an intellectual fountain,' and that
the kinds and degrees of beauty are the images of its authority.

II. HIS RULING SYMBOLS

At a comparatively early time Shelley made his imprisoned Cythna become
wise in all human wisdom through the c