on of the
noble passions, but by letting them loose in full freedom to pursue
after their highest aims. Not in restraint, but in the conscious
impetuosity of the soul towards the divine realities, is the wisdom of
life. Many poems are consecrated to this idea.

So, cleansing his soul by ennobling desire, he sought to realise his
dreams in the arts, in the creation and expression of pure Beauty. And
he followed Poetry and Music and Painting, and chiefly explored passion
and mind in the great poets. Fed at these deep springs, his soul rose
into keen life; his powers burst forth, and gazing on all systems and
schemes of philosophy and government, he heard ineffable things
unguessed by man. All Plato entered into him; he vowed himself to
liberty and the new world where "men were to be as gods and earth us
heaven." Thus, yet here on earth, not only beyond the earth, he would
attain the Perfect. Man also shall attain it; and so thinking, he
turned, like Sordello, to look at and learn mankind, pondering "how best
life's end might be attained--an end comprising every joy."

And even as he believed, the glory vanished; everything he had hoped for
broke to pieces:

First went my hopes of perfecting mankind,
Next--faith in them, and then in freedom's self
And virtue's self, then my own motives, ends
And aims and loves, and human love went last.

And then, with the loss of all these things of the soul which bear a
man's desires into the invisible and unreachable, he gained the world,
and success in it. All the powers of the mere Intellect, that
grey-haired deceiver whose name is Archimago, were his;--wit, mockery,
analytic force, keen reasoning on the visible, the Understanding's
absolute belief in itself; its close grasp on what it called facts, and
its clear application of knowledge for clear ends. God, too, had
vanished in this intellectual satisfaction; and in the temple of his
soul, where He had been worshipped, troops of shadows now knelt to the
man whose intellect, having grasped all knowledge, was content; and
hailed him as king.

The position he describes is like that Wordsworth states in the
_Prelude_ to have been his, when, after the vanishing of his aspirations
for man which followed the imperialistic fiasco of the French
Revolution, he found himself without love or hope, but with full power
to make an intellectual analysis of nature and of human nature, and was
destroyed thereby. It is the same p