ead."

It must have been about this very time that the law of England (quite
content to regard the owner of the closed door as a virtuous citizen)
decided that the Shelley who carried this poor stranger into shelter,
fetched a doctor, and out of his own poverty relieved her direr need,
was unfit to bring up his own children.

If Shelley allowed himself to be persuaded by Godwin to abandon his
missionary adventures, he pursued the ideal in his poems. Whether by
Platonic influence, or by the instinct of his own temperament, he moves
half-consciously from the Godwinian notion that mankind are to be
reasoned into perfection. The contemplation of beauty is with him the
first stage in the progress towards reasoned virtue. "My purpose," he
writes in the preface to _Prometheus_, "has been ... to familiarise ...
poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware
that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and
endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the
highway of life, which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust,
although they would bear the harvest of his happiness." It was for want
of virtue, as Mary Wollstonecraft reflected, writing sadly after the
Terror, that the French Revolution had failed. The lesson of all the
horrors of oppression and reaction which Shelley described, the comfort
of all the listening spirits who watch from their mental eyries the slow
progress of mankind to perfection, the example of martyred
patriots--these tend always to the moral which Demogorgon sums up at the
end of the unflagging, unearthly beauties of the last triumphant act of
_Prometheus Unbound_:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

To suffer, to forgive, to love, but above all, to defy--that was for
Shelley the whole duty of man.

In two peculiarities, which he constantly emphasised, Shelley's view of
progress differed at once from Godwin's conception, and from the notion
of a slow evolutionary growth which the men of to-day consider
historical he traced the impulse which is to lead mankind to perfe