sensible.' It was therefore natural that
Blake, who was always praising energy, and all exalted overflowing of
oneself, and who thought art an impassioned labour to keep men from doubt
and despondency, and woman's love an evil, when it would trammel the man's
will, should see the poetic genius not in a woman star but in the Sun,
and should rejoice throughout his poetry in 'the Sun in his strength.'
Shelley, however, except when he uses it to describe the peculiar beauty
of Emilia Viviani, who was 'like an incarnation of the Sun when light is
changed to love,' saw it with less friendly eyes. He seems to have seen it
with perfect happiness only when veiled in mist, or glimmering upon water,
or when faint enough to do no more than veil the brightness of his own
Star; and in _The Triumph of Life_, the one poem in which it is part of
the avowed symbolism, its power is the being and the source of all
tyrannies. When the woman personifying the Morning Star has faded from
before his eyes, Rousseau sees a 'new vision' in 'a cold bright car' with
a rainbow hovering over her, and as she comes the shadow passes from 'leaf
and stone,' and the souls she has enslaved seem in 'that light like
atomies to dance within a sunbeam,' or they dance among the flowers that
grow up newly 'in the grassy verdure of the desert,' unmindful of the
misery that is to come upon them. 'These are the great, the unforgotten,'
all who have worn 'mitres and helms and crowns or wreaths of light,' and
yet have not known themselves. Even 'great Plato' is there because he knew
joy and sorrow, because life that could not subdue him by gold or pain, by
'age or sloth or slavery,' subdued him by love. All who have ever lived
are there except Christ and Socrates and 'the sacred few' who put away all
life could give, being doubtless followers throughout their lives of the
forms borne by the flying ideal, or who, 'as soon as they had touched the
world with living flame, flew back like eagles to their native noon.'

In ancient times, it seems to me that Blake, who for all his protest was
glad to be alive, and ever spoke of his gladness, would have worshipped
in some chapel of the Sun, and that Keats, who accepted life gladly though
'with a delicious diligent indolence,' would have worshipped in some
chapel of the Moon, but that Shelley, who hated life because he sought
'more in life than any understood,' would have wandered, lost in a
ceaseless reverie, in some chapel of