irtuous that 'kingly glare will lose its
power to dazzle and silently pass by,' and as it seems even commerce, 'the
venal interchange of all that human art or nature yields, which wealth
should purchase not,' come as silently to an end.

He was always, indeed in chief, a witness for that 'power unappealable.'
Maddalo, in _Julian and Maddalo_, says that the soul is powerless, and can
only, like a 'dreary bell hung in a heaven-illumined tower, toll our
thoughts and our desires to meet round the rent heart and pray'; but
Julian, who is Shelley himself, replies, as the makers of all religions
have replied--

'Where is the beauty, love and truth we seek
But in our minds? And if we were not weak,
Should we be less in deed than in desire?'

while _Mont Blanc_ is an intricate analogy to affirm that the soul has its
sources in 'the secret strength of things,' 'which governs thought and to
the infinite heavens is a law.' He even thought that men might be immortal
were they sinless, and his Cythna bids the sailors be without remorse, for
all that live are stained as they are. It is thus, she says, that time
marks men and their thoughts for the tomb. And the 'Red Comet,' the image
of evil in _Laon and Cythna_, when it began its war with the star of
beauty, brought not only 'Fear, Hatred, Fraud, and Tyranny,' but 'Death,
Decay, Earthquake, and Blight and Madness pale.'

When the Red Comet is conquered, when Jupiter is overthrown by Demogorgon,
when the prophecy of Queen Mab is fulfilled, visible nature will put on
perfection again. He declares, in one of the notes to _Queen Mab_, that
'there is no great extravagance in presuming ... that there should be a
perfect identity between the moral and physical improvement of the human
species,' and thinks it 'certain that wisdom is not compatible with
disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of the earth,
health in the true and comprehensive sense of the word is out of the reach
of civilized man.' In _Prometheus Unbound_ he sees, as in the ecstasy of a
saint, the ships moving among the seas of the world without fear of
danger

'by the light
Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
And music soft,'

and poison dying out of the green things, and cruelty out of all living
things, and even the toads and efts becoming beautiful, and at last Time
being borne 'to his tomb in eternity.'

This beauty, this divine order, whereof