ather than criticising it?
Besides, there is need of fixing the ideal by which criticism is to be
guided. If you have no image of happiness or beauty or perfect
goodness before you, how are you to judge what portions of life are
important, and what rendering of them is appropriate?

Being a singer inwardly inspired, Shelley could picture the ideal
goals of life, the ultimate joys of experience, better than a
discursive critic or observer could have done. The circumstances of
life are only the bases or instruments of life: the fruition of life
is not in retrospect, not in description of the instruments, but in
expression of the spirit itself, to which those instruments may prove
useful; as music is not a criticism of violins, but a playing upon
them. This expression need not resemble its ground. Experience is
diversified by colours that are not produced by colours, sounds that
are not conditioned by sounds, names that are not symbols for other
names, fixed ideal objects that stand for ever-changing material
processes. The mind is fundamentally lyrical, inventive, redundant.
Its visions are its own offspring, hatched in the warmth of some
favourable cosmic gale. The ambient weather may vary, and these
visions be scattered; but the ideal world they pictured may some day
be revealed again to some other poet similarly inspired; the
possibility of restoring it, or something like it, is perpetual. It is
precisely because Shelley's sense for things is so fluid, so illusive,
that it opens to us emotionally what is a serious scientific
probability; namely, that human life is not all life, nor the
landscape of earth the only admired landscape in the universe; that
the ancients who believed in gods and spirits were nearer the virtual
truth (however anthropomorphically they may have expressed themselves)
than any philosophy or religion that makes human affairs the centre
and aim of the world. Such moral imagination is to be gained by
sinking into oneself, rather than by observing remote happenings,
because it is at its heart, not at its fingertips, that the human soul
touches matter, and is akin to whatever other centres of life may
people the infinite.

For this reason the masters of spontaneity, the prophets, the inspired
poets, the saints, the mystics, the musicians are welcome and most
appealing companions. In their simplicity and abstraction from the
world they come very near the heart. They say little and help much.
They do