of the inmost cave of man's mind
as the Morning Star leads the sun out of the waves. We know too that had
_Prince Athanase_ been finished it would have described the finding of
Pandemus, the stars' lower genius, and the growing weary of her, and the
coming to its true genius Urania at the coming of death, as the day finds
the Star at evening. There is hardly indeed a poem of any length in which
one does not find it as a symbol of love, or liberty, or wisdom, or
beauty, or of some other expression of that Intellectual Beauty, which was
to Shelley's mind the central power of the world; and to its faint and
fleeting light he offers up all desires, that are as

'The desire of the Moth for the star,
The desire for something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.'

When its genius comes to Rousseau, shedding dew with one hand, and
treading out the stars with her feet, for she is also the genius of the
dawn, she brings him a cup full of oblivion and love. He drinks and his
mind becomes like sand 'on desert Labrador' marked by the feet of deer and
a wolf. And then the new vision, life, the cold light of day moves before
him, and the first vision becomes an invisible presence. The same image
was in his mind too when he wrote

'Hesperus flies from awakening night
And pants in its beauty with speed and light,
Fast fleeting, soft and bright.'

Though I do not think that Shelley needed to go to Porphyry's account of
the cold intoxicating cup, given to the souls in the constellation of the
Cup near the constellation Cancer, for so obvious a symbol as the cup, or
that he could not have found the wolf and the deer and the continual
flight of his Star in his own mind, his poetry becomes the richer, the
more emotional, and loses something of its appearance of idle phantasy
when I remember that these are ancient symbols, and still come to
visionaries in their dreams. Because the wolf is but a more violent symbol
of longing and desire than the hound, his wolf and deer remind me of the
hound and deer that Usheen saw in the Gaelic poem chasing one another on
the water before he saw the young man following the woman with the golden
apple; and of a Galway tale that tells how Niam, whose name means
brightness or beauty, came to Usheen as a deer; and of a vision that a
friend of mine saw when gazing at a dark-blue curtain. I was with a number
of Hermetists, and one of them said to another, 'Do you see something in
the curtain?' Th