ideal, she is not loved by the
children of desire.

Shelley could not help but see her with unfriendly eyes. He is believed to
have described Mary Shelley at a time when she had come to seem cold in
his eyes, in that passage of _Epipsychidion_ which tells how a woman like
the Moon led him to her cave and made 'frost' creep over the sea of his
mind, and so bewitched life and death with 'her silver voice' that they
ran from him crying, 'Away, he is not of our crew.' When he describes the
Moon as part of some beautiful scene he can call her beautiful, but when
he personifies, when his words come under the influence of that great
memory or of some mysterious tide in the depth of our being, he grows
unfriendly or not truly friendly or at the most pitiful. The Moon's lips
'are pale and waning,' it is 'the cold Moon,' or 'the frozen and
inconstant Moon,' or it is 'forgotten' and 'waning,' or it 'wanders' and
is 'weary,' or it is 'pale and grey,' or it is 'pale for weariness,' and
'wandering companionless' and 'ever changing,' and finding 'no object
worth' its 'constancy,' or it is like a 'dying lady' who 'totters' 'out of
her chamber led by the insane and feeble wanderings of her fading brain,'
and even when it is no more than a star, it casts an evil influence that
makes the lips of lovers 'lurid' or pale. It only becomes a thing of
delight when Time is being borne to his tomb in eternity, for then the
spirit of the Earth, man's procreant mind, fills it with his own
joyousness. He describes the spirit of the Earth and of the Moon, moving
above the rivulet of their lives in a passage which reads like a
half-understood vision. Man has become 'one harmonious soul of many a
soul' and 'all things flow to all' and 'familiar acts are beautiful
through love,' and an 'animation of delight' at this change flows from
spirit to spirit till the snow 'is loosened from the Moon's lifeless
mountains.'

Some old magical writer, I forget who, says if you wish to be melancholy
hold in your left hand an image of the Moon made out of silver, and if you
wish to be happy hold in your right hand an image of the Sun made out of
gold. The Sun is the symbol of sensitive life, and of belief and joy and
pride and energy, of indeed the whole life of the will, and of that beauty
which neither lures from far off, nor becomes beautiful in giving itself,
but makes all glad because it is beauty. Taylor quotes Proclus as calling
it 'the Demiurgos of everything