ddy
vesture of decay."

The three great English poets who are also fundamentally mystical in
thought are Browning, Wordsworth, and Blake. Their philosophy or
mystical belief, one in essence, though so differently expressed, lies
at the root, as it is also the flower, of their life-work. In others, as
in Shelley, Keats, and Rossetti, although it is the inspiring force of
their poetry, it is not a flame, burning steadily and evenly, but rather
a light flashing out intermittently into brilliant and dazzling
radiance. Hence the man himself is not so permeated by it; and hence
results the unsatisfied desire, the almost painful yearning, the
recurring disappointment and disillusionment, which we do not find in
Browning, Wordsworth, and Blake.

In our first group we have four poets of markedly different
temperaments--Shelley intensely spiritual; Rossetti with a strong tinge
of sensuousness, of "earthiness" in his nature; Browning, the keenly
intellectual man of the world, and Patmore a curious mixture of
materialist and mystic; yet to all four love is the secret of life, the
one thing worth giving and possessing.

Shelley believed in a Soul of the Universe, a Spirit in which all things
live and move and have their being; which, as one feels in the
_Prometheus_, is unnamable, inconceivable even to man, for "the deep
truth is imageless." His most passionate desire was not, as was
Browning's, for an increased and ennobled individuality, but for the
mystical fusion of his own personality with this Spirit, this object of
his worship and adoration. To Shelley, death itself was but the rending
of a veil which would admit us to the full vision of the ideal, which
alone is true life. The sense of unity in all things is most strongly
felt in _Adonais_, where Shelley's maturest thought and philosophy are
to be found; and indeed the mystical fervour in this poem, especially
towards the end, is greater than anywhere else in his writings. The
_Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_ is in some ways Shelley's clearest and
most obvious expression of his devotion to the Spirit of Ideal Beauty,
its reality to him, and his vow of dedication to its service. But the
_Prometheus_ is the most deeply mystical of his poems; indeed, as Mrs
Shelley says, "it requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as Shelley's
own to understand the mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem."

Shelley, like Blake, regarded the human imagination as a divine creative
force