ontemplation of her own mind, and
write out this wisdom upon the sand in 'signs' that were 'clear elemental
shapes whose smallest change' made 'a subtler language within language'
and were 'the key of truths, which once were dimly taught in old
Crotona.' His early romances and much throughout his poetry show how
strong a fascination the traditions of magic and of the magical philosophy
had cast over his mind, and one can hardly suppose that he had not brooded
over their doctrine of symbols or signatures, though I do not find
anything to show that he gave it any deep study. One finds in his poetry,
besides innumerable images that have not the definiteness of symbols, many
images that are certainly symbols, and as the years went by he began to
use these with a more and more deliberately symbolic purpose. I imagine
that, when he wrote his earlier poems, he allowed the subconscious life to
lay its hands so firmly upon the rudder of his imagination, that he was
little conscious of the abstract meaning of the images that rose in what
seemed the idleness of his mind. Any one who has any experience of any
mystical state of the soul knows how there float up in the mind profound
symbols,[1] whose meaning, if indeed they do not delude one into the dream
that they are meaningless, one does not perhaps understand for years. Nor
I think has any one, who has known that experience with any constancy,
failed to find some day in some old book or on some old monument, a
strange or intricate image, that had floated up before him, and grow
perhaps dizzy with the sudden conviction that our little memories are but
a part of some great memory that renews the world and men's thoughts age
after age, and that our thoughts are not, as we suppose, the deep but a
little foam upon the deep. Shelley understood this, as is proved by what
he says of the eternity of beautiful things and of the influence of the
dead, but whether he understood that the great memory is also a
dwelling-house of symbols, of images that are living souls, I cannot
tell. He had certainly experience of all but the most profound of the
mystical states, of that union with created things which assuredly must
precede the soul's union with the uncreated spirit. He says in his
fragment of an essay upon life, mistaking a unique experience for the
common experience of all: 'Let us recollect our sensations as children ...
we less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt from ourselv