es.
They seemed as it were to constitute one mass. There are some persons who
in this respect are always children. Those who are subject to the state
called reverie, feel as if their nature were resolved into the surrounding
universe, or as if the surrounding universe were resolved into their
being,' and he must have expected to receive thoughts and images from
beyond his own mind, just in so far as that mind transcended its
preoccupation with particular time and place, for he believed inspiration
a kind of death; and he could hardly have helped perceiving that an image
that has transcended particular time and place becomes a symbol, passes
beyond death, as it were, and becomes a living soul.

When Shelley went to the Continent with Godwin's daughter in 1812 they
sailed down certain great rivers in an open boat, and when he summed up in
his preface to _Laon and Cythna_ the things that helped to make him a
poet, he spoke of these voyages: 'I have sailed down mighty rivers and
seen the sun rise and set and the stars come forth whilst I sailed night
and day down a rapid stream among mountains.'

He may have seen some cave that was the bed of a rivulet by some river
side, or have followed some mountain stream to its source in a cave, for
from his return to England rivers and streams and wells, flowing through
caves or rising in them, came into every poem of his that was of any
length, and always with the precision of symbols. Alastor passed in his
boat along a river in a cave; and when for the last time he felt the
presence of the spirit he loved and followed, it was when he watched his
image in a silent well; and when he died it was where a river fell into
'an abysmal chasm'; and the Witch of Atlas in her gladness, as he in his
sadness, passed in her boat along a river in a cave, and it was where it
bubbled out of a cave that she was born; and when Rousseau, the typical
poet of _The Triumph of Life_, awoke to the vision that was life, it was
where a rivulet bubbled out of a cave; and the poet of _Epipsychidion_ met
the evil beauty 'by a well under blue nightshade bowers'; and Cythna bore
her child imprisoned in a great cave beside 'a fountain round and vast and
in which the wave imprisoned leaped and boiled perpetually'; and her lover
Laon was brought to his prison in a high column through a cave where there
was 'a putrid pool,' and when he went to see the conquered city he
dismounted beside a polluted fountain in the mark