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history out of the picture. This lyrical vision restores it, whole,
complete, and literal. The wealth of the concrete takes its revenge upon
the victim of abstraction. The men of his golden age are no longer
tribeless and nationless. They are Greeks. He has peopled his future;
but, as the picture hardens into detail, he seems to shrink from it.
That other earlier theme of his symphony recurs. His chorus had sung:

Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind.
The foul cubs like their parents are,
Their den is in their guilty mind,
And conscience feeds them with despair.

Some end there must be to the _perpetuum mobile_ of wrong and revenge.
And yet it seems to be in human affairs the very principle of motion.
He ends with a cry and a prayer, and a clouded vision. The infinity of
evil must be stayed, but what if its cessation means extinction?

O cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! Drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past
O might it die, or rest at last.

Never were there simpler verses in a great song. But he were a bold man
who would pretend to know quite certainly what they mean. Shelley is not
sure whether his vision of perfection will be embodied in the earth. For
a moment he seems to hope that Greece will renew her glories. For one
fleeting instant--how ironical the vision seems to us--he conceives that
she may be re-incarnated in America. But there is a deeper doubt than
this in the prophet's mind. He is not sure that he wants to see the
Golden Age founded anew in the perilous world of fact. There is a
pattern of the perfect society laid up in Heaven, or if that phrase by
familiarity has lost its meaning, let us say rather that the Republic
exists firmly founded in the human mind itself:

But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.

Again, and yet again, he tells us that the heavenly city, the New
Athens, "the kingless continents, sinless as Eden" shine in no common
day, beside no earthly sea:

If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble,
And build themselves impregnably
In a diviner clime,
To Amphionic music on some cape sublime
Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.

Is it only an eloquent phrase, which satisfies us, by its beautiful
words, we know not why, as th