man might be euthanasia. It would not be
paradise.

The third of Shelley's visions of perfection is the climax of _Hellas_.
One feels in attempting to make about _Hellas_ any statement in bald
prose, the same sense of baffled incompetence that a modest mind
experiences in attempting to describe music. One reads what the critics
have written about Beethoven's Heroic Symphony, to close the page
wondering that men with ears should have dared to write it. The
insistent rhythm beats in your blood, the absorbing melodies obsess your
brain, and you turn away realising that emotion, when it can find a
channel of sense, has a power which defies the analytic understanding.
_Hellas_, in a sense, is absolute poetry, as the "Eroica" is absolute
music. Ponder a few lines in one of the choruses which seem to convey a
definite idea, and against your will the elaborate rhythms and rhymes
will carry you along, until thought ceases and only the music and the
picture hold your imagination.

And yet Shelley meant something as certainly as Beethoven did. Nowhere
is his genius so realistic, so closely in touch with contemporary fact,
yet nowhere does he soar so easily into his own ideal world. He
conceived it while Mavrocordato, about to start to fight for the
liberation of Greece, was paying daily visits to Shelley's circle at
Pisa. The events in Turkey, now awful, now hopeful, were before him as
crude facts in the newspaper. The historians of classical Greece were
his continual study. As he steeped himself in Plato, a world of ideal
forms opened before him in a timeless heaven as real as history, as
actual as the newspapers. _Hellas_ is the vision of a mind which touches
fact through sense, but makes of sense the gate and avenue into an
immortal world of thought. Past and present and future are fused in one
glowing symphony. The Sultan is no more real than Xerxes, and the golden
consummation glitters with a splendour as dazzling and as present as the
Age of Pericles. For Shelley, this denial of time had become a conscious
doctrine. Berkeley and Plato had become for him in his later years
influences as intimate as Godwin. Again and again in his later poems, he
turns from the cruelties and disappointments of the world, from death
and decay and failure, no longer with revolt and anger, but with a
serene contempt. Thought is the only reality; time with its appearance
of mortality is the dream and the illusion. Says Ahasuerus in _Hellas_: