f martyrdom, martyrs, as is well known, usually feel assured of
victory. The _a priori_ spirit will therefore be always a prophet of
victory, so long as it subsists at all. The vision of a better world
at hand absorbed the Israelites in exile, St. John the Baptist in the
desert, and Christ on the cross. The martyred spirit always says to
the world it leaves, "This day thou shall be with me in paradise."

In just this way, Shelley believed in perfectibility. In his latest
poems--in _Hellas_, in _Adonais_--he was perhaps a little inclined to
remove the scene of perfectibility to a metaphysical region, as the
Christian church soon removed it to the other world. Indeed, an earth
really made perfect is hardly distinguishable from a posthumous
heaven: so profoundly must everything in it be changed, and so
angel-like must every one in it become. Shelley's earthly paradise, as
described in _Prometheus_ and in _Epipsychidion_, is too
festival-like> too much of a mere culmination, not to be fugitive: it
cries aloud to be translated into a changeless and metaphysical
heaven, which to Shelley's mind could be nothing but the realm of
Platonic ideas, where "life, like a dome of many-coloured glass," no
longer "stains the white radiance of eternity." But the age had been
an age of revolution and, in spite of disappointments, retained its
faith in revolution; and the young Shelley was not satisfied with a
paradise removed to the intangible realms of poetry or of religion; he
hoped, like the old Hebrews, for a paradise on earth. His notion was
that eloquence could change the heart of man, and that love, kindled
there by the force of reason and of example, would transform society.
He believed, Mrs. Shelley tells us, "that mankind had only to will
that there should be no evil, and there would be none." And she adds:
"That man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel evil from
his own nature, and from the greater part of creation, was the
cardinal point of his system." This cosmic extension of the conversion
of men reminds one of the cosmic extension of the Fall conceived by
St. Augustine; and in the _Prometheus_ Shelley has allowed his fancy,
half in symbol, half in glorious physical hyperbole, to carry the warm
contagion of love into the very bowels of the earth, and even the
moon, by reflection, to catch the light of love, and be alive again.

Shelley, we may safely say, did not understand the real constitution
of nature. It w