te _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_ was not the _Critique of
Pure Reason_. But to Shelley _Political Justice_ was the veritable "milk
of paradise." We must drink of it ourselves if we would share his
banquet. Godwin in short explains Shelley, and it is equally true that
Shelley is the indispensable commentary to Godwin. For all that was
living and human in the philosopher he finds imaginative expression. His
mind was a selective soil, in which only good seed could germinate. The
flowers wear the colour of life and emotion. In the clear light of his
verse, gleaming in their passionate hues, they display for us their
values. Some of them, the bees of a working hive will consent to
fertilise; from others they will turn decidedly away. Shelley is
Godwin's fertile garden. From another standpoint he is the desert which
Godwin laid waste.

It is, indeed, the commonplace of criticism to insist on the reality
which the ideal world possessed for Shelley. Other poets have
illustrated thought by sensuous imagery. To Shelley, thought alone was
the essential thing. A good impulse, a dream, an idea, were for him
what a Centaur or a Pegasus were for common fancy. He sees in
_Prometheus Unbound_ a spirit who

Speeded hither on the sigh
Of one who gave an enemy
His plank, then plunged aside to die.

Another spirit rides on a sage's "dream with plumes of flame"; and a
third tells how a poet

Will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume,
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed, nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.

How naturally from Shelley's imagination flowed the lines about Keats:--

All he had loved and moulded into thought
From shape and hue and odour and sweet sound
Lamented Adonais.

This was no rhetoric, no affectation of fancy. Shelley saw the immortal
shapes of "Desires and Adorations" lamenting over the bier of the mortal
Keats, because for him an idea or a passion was incomparably more real
and more comprehensible than the things of flesh and earth, of whose
existence the senses persuade us. To such a mind philosophy was not a
distant world to be entered with diffident and halting feet, ever ready
to retreat at the first alarm of commonsense. It was his daily
habitation. He lived in it, and guided himself by its intellectual
compass among the perils and wonders of life, as natural