assed in England for philosophy, his keen spirit flew to the opposite
pole of thought with a recoil that carried him at first to inconsiderate
negation. His passionate love of liberty, his loathing for intolerance,
his impatience of control for self and others, and his vivid logical
sincerity, combined to make him the Quixotic champion of extreme
opinions. He was too fearless to be wise, too precipitate to suspend his
judgment, too convinced of the paramount importance of iconoclasm, to
mature his views in silence. With the unbounded audacity of youth, he
hoped to take the fortresses of "Anarch Custom" by storm at the first
assault. His favourite ideal was the vision of a youth, Laon or Lionel,
whose eloquence had power to break the bonds of despotism, as the sun
thaws ice upon an April morning. It was enough, he thought, to hurl the
glove of defiance boldly at the tyrant's face--to sow the "Necessity of
Atheism" broadcast on the bench of Bishops, and to depict incest in his
poetry, not because he wished to defend it, but because society must
learn to face the most abhorrent problems with impartiality. Gifted with
a touch as unerring as Ithuriel's spear for the unmasking of hypocrisy,
he strove to lay bare the very substance of the soul beneath the crust
of dogma and the froth of traditional beliefs; nor does it seem to have
occurred to him that, while he stripped the rags and patches that
conceal the nakedness of ordinary human nature, he might drag away the
weft and woof of nobler thought. In his poet-philosopher's imagination
there bloomed a wealth of truth and love and beauty so abounding, that
behind the mirage he destroyed, he saw no blank, but a new Eternal City
of the Spirit. He never doubted whether his fellow-creatures were
certain to be equally fortunate.

Shelley had no faculty for compromise, no perception of the blended
truths and falsehoods through which the mind of man must gradually win
its way from the obscurity of myths into the clearness of positive
knowledge, for ever toiling and for ever foiled, and forced to content
itself with the increasing consciousness of limitations. Brimming over
with love for men, he was deficient in sympathy with the conditions
under which they actually think and feel. Could he but dethrone the
Anarch Custom, the millennium, he argued, would immediately arrive; nor
did he stop to think how different was the fibre of his own soul from
that of the unnumbered multitudes around