'spangled sands' and 'rarest sea shells.' The tower,
important in Maeterlinck, as in Shelley, is, like the sea, and rivers, and
caves with fountains, a very ancient symbol, and would perhaps, as years
went by, have grown more important in his poetry. The contrast between it
and the cave in _Laon and Cythna_ suggests a contrast between the mind
looking outward upon men and things and the mind looking inward upon
itself, which may or may not have been in Shelley's mind, but certainly
helps, with one knows not how many other dim meanings, to give the poem
mystery and shadow. It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have
numberless meanings beside the one or two the writer lays an emphasis
upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly subjective art can
escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious
arrangement, into the abundance and depth of nature. The poet of essences
and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer from symbol to
symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the epic and dramatic poet
finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental circumstance of life.

The most important, the most precise of all Shelley's symbols, the one he
uses with the fullest knowledge of its meaning, is the Morning and Evening
Star. It rises and sets for ever over the towers and rivers, and is the
throne of his genius. Personified as a woman it leads Rousseau, the
typical poet of _The Triumph of Life_, under the power of the destroying
hunger of life, under the power of the sun that we shall find presently as
a symbol of life, and it is the Morning Star that wars against the
principle of evil in _Laon and Cythna_, at first as a star with a red
comet, here a symbol of all evil as it is of disorder in _Epipsychidion_,
and then as a serpent with an eagle--symbols in Blake too and in the
Alchemists; and it is the Morning Star that appears as a winged youth to a
woman, who typifies humanity amid its sorrows, in the first canto of _Laon
and Cythna_; and it is evoked by the wailing women of _Hellas_, who call
it 'lamp of the free' and 'beacon of love' and would go where it hides
flying from the deepening night among those 'kingless continents sinless
as Eden,' and 'mountains and islands' 'prankt on the sapphire sea' that
are but the opposing hemispheres to the senses but, as I think, the ideal
world, the world of the dead, to the imagination; and in the _Ode to
Liberty_, Liberty is bid lead wisdom out